Notificações da COVID-19 no Espírito Santo : entre matérias jornalísticas e dados oficiais

Abstract

The media plays a crucial role in setting the public agenda by highlighting and prioritizing certain issues. In the realm of digital media, the speed of information dissemination and the nearly infinite possibilities of reaching individuals make it a powerful tool, especially during times of social upheaval like a pandemic. This study aimed to analyze journalistic communication through the flow of news articles and its relationship with the epidemiology of COVID-19 cases in Espírito Santo, Brazil, from 2020 to 2021.To gather news articles, a robotic capture system, SIGCOVID-19, was employed, resulting in a total of 13,121 articles. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 783 articles remained and were entered into Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) using a pre-existing protocol. The number of new COVID-19 cases obtained, 633,014, was organized by epidemiological week and subsequently calculated for relative frequency, Spearman's correlation, and Pearson's chi-square test. While the year 2021 in isolation showed a moderate inverse correlation (p-value > 0.01), no significant correlation was observed between new COVID-19 cases and news coverage in the two years of study, contradicting previous studies on seasonal epidemic diseases. Regarding editorial characteristics, significant differences were observed in the variables Format - Opinion Space (p-value = 0.042), Editorial Elements - Infographic (p-value = 0.041, with a reduction from 6.3% to 3%), Cited Source - Health Professional (p-value = 0.004 and a reduction from 16.9% to 11%), and Editorial Elements - Audio (p-value = 0.004, with an increase from 1.2% to 4%). There was a predominance of citations from Official/Government sources (86.2% of citations in the 2020-2021 biennium), followed by citations from Health Professionals (14.7% of citations). Despite the media's potential to instigate social change by setting the agenda for public discussion, the increase in the number of cases does not appear to have been a primary criterion for the production of news articles on the subject. The frequent emergence of other keywords such as "death," "obituary," and "mortality" raises questions about the newsworthiness criteria actually used in covering the COVID-19 pandemic in Espírito Santo