SARS Epidemic in the Press

(WHO) issued a global alert regarding severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and China's Guangdong Province. Three days later, for the first time in its history , WHO recommended postponing nonessential travel to the affected areas and screening airline passengers (1). These initiatives, together with the awareness of the modes transmission of the coronavirus associated with SARS (SARS-CoV), led to extensive press coverage. To describe the extent of this coverage in Italy and to identify the events that prompted peak coverage, we reviewed the five Italian daily newspapers with the highest circulation (2) from March 12 to March 30. The articles were identified by hand search (reading headlines, subheads, and titles) and were classified according to the publication date and page number. We assigned one point to full articles and to front-page articles or headlines and half a point to short articles. We also reviewed all national newspapers for articles published before the travel advisory (March 12–15)(Figure). Before the travel advisory, no articles were published in the five newspapers , whereas on March 14, one article was published in a smaller newspaper (" Osservatore Romano, " the Vatican newspaper). On March 16 (the day after the advisory), six articles appeared in the five newspapers; through May 31, a total of 750 articles were published. The proportion of articles that appeared on the front-page was 9.6%, although this percentage was higher early in the study (50%) than at the time of absolute peak coverage (12%). After the first wave of articles in mid-March, several peaks occurred until mid-April. The events prompting these peaks were identified by determining the most frequently covered topics, specifically: the death of Carlo Urbani, the Italian WHO officer who identified the disease in Hanoi; the first two probable cases in Italy; the death of a suspected case in Naples; and the press conference announcing the first meeting of the Italian National Task Force. The highest peak occurred on April 23, after the announcement that the number of cases had reached 4,000 and that a vaccine would not be available anytime soon. In the days after the peak, coverage remained quite high, in association with the definition of SARS as a " global threat " by WHO and the twofold increase in the number of probable cases in Italy. The high press coverage was followed by an overall decrease, although small peaks occurred in association …