What does it mean to engage the public in the response to covid-19?

Dear Editor,

At the beginning of the covid-19 epidemic, the public appealed the right to participate in joint decision-making on covid-19 containing policy and follow-up response plans responding to the epidemic. However, compared with the patient and public involvement and engagement in research or clinical practice, public involvement in emergency management in the field of public health is more complicated. It needs to integrate more evidence and balance the cost of public participatory decision-making and timely response to the epidemic controlling. The analysis performed by Scheinerman and colleagues provides a very helpful framework for discussions in this area. [1]

As to the epidemic situation and responding actions in Germany, the principle of transparency has been implemented to a material extent. Both how the government agencies are managing the pandemic and individuals’ role have been effectively communicated to the public through various channels, the public review and criticism can reach the government in different ways. However, despite the openness and transparency of the actions and the epidemiological indicators (the thresholds) on which they are based, critiques on the specific values of the thresholds and the lack of transparency of their evidence-based basis has never stopped.[2] Due to the disparity between information and knowledge, professionals are especially required in this regard to help the public understand in order to achieve better public participation.

Different from general research and clinical practice where the public participates most at the individual or organizational level, public participation in public health incident response has risen to the policy level, and the step by step mode from consultation, involvement, collaboration to patient and public directed also be changed in response to the public health emergencies which requires the methods of public participation to be reconsidered. Formal and informal deliberations as well as wide-ranging discussions and debates do help the public learn and share their views. However, during the critical period of rapid changes in the epidemic situation, the government should also adopt more simplified public participation strategies to speed up the response actions. On the premise of protecting the rights and interests of the public from an ethical perspective, a simplified public participation method can better protect the common interests of the public, which is also the ultimate goal of public involvement.

Dong Qu [1], Zhi Qu [2], Zhong Huang [3,4]

1 Institute of Legal Medicine, Hannover Medical School, 30625, Hannover, Germany.
2 Institute of Epidemiology, Social Medicine, and Health System Research, Hannover Medical School, 30625, Hannover, Germany.
3 Institute of Neuroanatomy and Cell Biology, Hannover Medical School, 30623 Hannover, Germany
4 Center for Systems Neuroscience (ZSN) Hannover, 30559 Hannover, Germany

References
1 Scheinerman, Naomi, and Matthew McCoy. "What does it mean to engage the public in the response to covid-19?." bmj 373 (2021).
2 DW. Making sense of coronavirus infection statistics. https://www.dw.com/en/making-sense-of-coronavirus-infection-statistics/a... (2021)