Risk fatigue and the infodemic: Understanding declining public responsiveness to health campaigns, mitigation strategies, and public health impact

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant challenges in public health communication, particularly due to the combined effects of risk fatigue and the infodemic. Risk fatigue refers to the public’s declining responsiveness to repeated health warnings, often driven by emotional exhaustion, information overload, and declining trust in institutions. At the same time, the infodemic, defined by the World Health Organization as an overabundance of information that includes both accurate and false content, fueled confusion, misinformation, and distrust, especially through social media. These dynamics created a feedback loop in which misinformation intensified fatigue, and fatigue increased susceptibility to misinformation. This paper examines how these phenomena undermined crisis communication during COVID-19, using the social amplification of risk framework, the health belief, the crisis and emergency risk communication model. It explores the main drivers, consequences, and mitigation strategies, including digital literacy, message tailoring, trust-building, and social listening. The analysis shows that effective crisis communication requires more than just accurate messaging. It must be adaptive, culturally sensitive, and trust-centered. Ultimately, this study highlights the need for resilient communication systems that can counter both fatigue and misinformation, especially in structurally disadvantaged populations and rapidly evolving digital environments.