From Ignorance to Distrust: The Public "Discovery" of COVID-19 Around International Women's Day in Spain

In the weeks around March 8, 2020, Spanish political authorities moved from denying
and minimizing COVID-19 (veiling international recommendations) to establishing a
State of Alarm. This uncertainty scenario is a natural experiment for exploring how
concealment and diffusion of critical messages in official discourse affected public and
published media, information transmission, and collective risk assessment. This study
explores, through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and network theory, press, and
Twitter agendas those days when (after international warnings, chaos on data, and the
authorization of large demonstrations) Spain made the “alarming discovery” of COVID-
19. Results show a swift change in the climate of opinion, from the week before to the
week after Women’s Day (March 8). Noninformation influenced agendas in terms of
themes, feelings, and behaviors. The way different societies made COVID-19’s
“discovery” became essential in the framing of the crisis and on the subsequent trust in
authorities during the pandemic. The suppression of information in the first moments
remains a key study question.