Rise in daily new Covid cases indicates coming communication cycle for the corporate sector, analysis

 21st October 2021    Healthcare 
 Paarul Chand

Here is the second column of PRmoment's new 'The Healthcare News Review' series that will look at the biggest healthcare news every week and analyse the communications implications of that.

Festival Fears, rise in daily Covid Cases

The big story, one that everyone has their eyes on, is the festive season. As people throng public spaces and party at home, the numbers showed their biggest single day rise since October 23rd. 

Even as schools are set to open, for all classes, in Delhi on the 1st of November, parents are exercised about the move. 

The roll out of the second dose of vaccine, and vaccine coverage in the wake of PM Modi's announcement of covering 1 billion with partial vaccine is also drawing top interest from the media.

It is also useful to examine the key words generated by coverage of the health sector in the last 7 days. As is evident, the main key words this week are all around the vaccine drive, PM Modi, and Covid deaths.

Other key words that made it but were lower on the priority scale are again around Covid in the context of rise in cases in Kerala and Maharashtra and current number of Covid deaths.

What does this mean for communicators?

This is both a global and national super-trend for communicators and the following story hooks emerge from it:

1) As fears of the third wave can get activated specially in the post festival phase, availability of news space will shrink again. In that scenario, the corporate sector will have to again pivot their narrative to a primary Covid peg. At the same time, media will be less willing to accept routine stories about individual firms and their CSR Covid efforts ( unless the scale and brand is news making). Media will however be open to sectoral and industry wide efforts, if several firms from a single sector or industry have made a converted CSR effort that will be useful information for the media.

2) As schools open up, WFH and hybrid models of work and the pressure on parents, especially women will make for some interesting workplace features. This is a story that will fit well with all types of media channels: print, TV, online and influencers.

3) The roll out of the second dose will continue to make news as well and again raise issues of access to vaccines.

The other stories that made health news this week are:

1) India seeks vaccine loans from Asian Development Bank and AIIB.

2) The shortfall of people covered by second dose of vaccines.

See you next week, if you want to share your views on the stories here, drop us a comment at @PRmomentIndia

Global Read: Track the latest country wise Covid figures at this site from the John Hopkins University  Do check out the dashboard.

Extra Extra! : PepsiCo has a robust process for evaluating ts ads to ensure sensitivity in the Covid environment.

See you next week!

News Curated for PRmoment India by:

Impact Research and Measurement