A Disease of Privilege? Social Representations in Online Media about Covid-19 among South Africans during Lockdown

Responses by South Africans to communication from their government about the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic have highlighted previously incommunicable socio-economic inequalities pervading access to healthcare. Government’s reaction in a bid to stem the Covid-19 global pandemic, though slow at commencement, has often been swift and decisive with regular briefings by ministerial clusters and the presidency in collaboration with various experts, displaying apparent transparency and ease of comprehension for audiences. However, there have arisen a range of oft-negative responses by citizens, such as announced courses of action, often based on representations of who the face of the virus is, and in turn influencing their responses to government’s courses of action. In this paper, a Social Representation approach was adopted, with a focus on citizen representations regarding the spread of the Covid-19 virus, arising social representations and potential health communication consequences. The PEN-3 cultural model on health beliefs and actions presents a cultural, yet contextual, understanding of public health and health promotion by predicting people’s behaviour within their immediate environment. This article analyses media reports of social representations of Covid-19 captured from South African online media conversations. These conversations illuminate underlying social representations of community beliefs fuelling the spread of the virus. The study contributes to social representation scholarship by providing a local perspective of factors affecting non-compliance with healthcare directives for Covid-19 because of existing socio-economic inequalities.