Assessing COVID-19 crisis communication and health outcomes based on the Intervention Ladder

Effective health communication is critically important in times of emergency. From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) delivered health announcements that were timely, transparent, trustworthy and proportional to the crisis. Moreover, each announcement contained one or more messages with guidance corresponding to varying levels of the Intervention Ladder. Our team analysed messages based on the eight levels of the Intervention Ladder and compared health outcomes between UAB employees and residents of Alabama, USA. Results suggested that announcements played an essential role in raising situational awareness about the severity of the pandemic and may have led to greater compliance by the UAB community, as demonstrated through comparative rates of hospitalisation, vaccination and mortality.