Lessons learned from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic: Communicating about public health risks on social media

COVID-19 presented a unique challenge to public health organizations' communication efforts. In the United States of America, local public health organizations are often overlooked as crisis communicators, which likely negatively affects the quality and efficacy of their risk communication efforts. This study of 128 press releases and tweets from the nine largest counties across three geographically dispersed states (New York, California, and Texas) was conducted to investigate the communicative response to COVID-19 of various public sector organizations in the United States. The study used the Extended Parallel Processing Model as a theoretical lens to assess the effectiveness of the risk communication messages and understand why people in the United States did not perceive the threat of the health crisis to be severe.