Build an expectation of change in risk communication
Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna
October 31, 2022
Looking at recent news in the United States, it could seem as if the Covid-19 pandemic is finally over.
President Biden suggested as much, while the Washington Post ran a story analyzing the motivationsof people who continue to wear masks while the rest of society has moved on. At the same time,
there are reports of new variants against which retrovirals may not work and prospects of yet anotherwinter surge of infections.
Is the Covid-19 pandemic over? Or are there a few more twists and turns ahead? If past history is any
precedent, it would tell us that predicting the future of complex and uncertain events, such as thepandemic, is tricky.
I’m a cultural anthropologist by training and years before the Covid-19 pandemic I studied theaftermath of a major industrial catastrophe: the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power
plant, especially as it related to food safety. When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, I was struck bysome of the parallels between the two crises. The comparison is not one-to-one; they are different
kinds of crises, but it reveals something important about risk communication.
The lesson from these two events is the importance of building an expectation of change in officialguidance. These are complex events, and their complexity causes them to unfold in unexpected ways.
As circumstances change, our knowledge about how to respond also changes. We do not have theluxury of perfect foresight and as a result official guidance requires updates. Thus, creating anexpectation of change would contribute towards building resilience when we face a similar situation
again.
Without the expectation of change, new guidance can provide an opening for confusion. In the caseof the nuclear accident, the Japanese government introduced a few days after the disaster emergency
safety standards to regulate the maximum amount of radiation that would be allowed in the foodsupply. These standards were then revised a year later to approximately 1/5 of the initial values.
When the new standards were announced but had not yet been adopted, I spoke with concerned
consumers who expressed confusion at the changing message. What did it say about the government’s
handling of the crisis if food that was considered safe right then would be deemed unsafe a few weeks
later once the new standards were phased in? When I spoke with government officials, theydescribed their objective as moving from what they framed as safe but temporary standards to safer
permanent guidance. However, the change in standards took place in a context where there was alack of trust in the government’s handling on the crisis, and the seemingly contradictory messages
created an opening for mistrust.
The Covid-19 pandemic as it unfolded in the United States also experienced moments of changing
guidance that created an opening for confusion and mistrust. In particular, the changing guidance
about masks in the early stages contributed to skepticism about expert advice. When the pandemic
first arrived in the United States, there were concerns that health workers and first responders

needed priority access to a limited supply of quality masks, and thus the Surgeon General and theCDC requested the general public not to purchase masks. However, the guidance changed soon
thereafter and everyone was asked to wear a mask. While there was a nuance to the message (reservehigh-quality masks for health workers and first responders; cloth masks for the general public), theabrupt change in recommendation contributed to further the mistrust of the official response, which
was already happening in the context of low levels of trust in government.
As we think about how to confront future crises, we would benefit from building into official
guidance an expectation of change. By this, I do not mean that we should have guidance that lacks
specificity or is timid in scope. The public needs to receive the best guidance available at that momentin time, but the message should also acknowledge the complexity of the situation and build anexpectation that recommendations will be revised as new information surfaces. In an ideal scenario,
the public would become a partner in adopting the best practices that emerge as knowledge builds
and avoids the mistrust that can result from changing guidance.