COLLECTIVE IMAGERY AND GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF THE SARS-COV-2 VIRION IN THE SPANISH MEDIA IN THE BEGINNING OF THE PANDEMIC

The media have played a leading role on Covid-19 news coverage in Spain. After the first cases were detected, they were forced to urgently develop graphic representations of the SARS-CoV-2 virion in order to talk about an invisible and unknown enemy. This study starts from the analysis of these early media representations to determine how they have contributed to the visual imagery of the virus in the Spanish population during the first wave. For this, a valid sample of 369 SARS-CoV-2 virion drawings made by adults during June and July 2020 was analysed and compared with the graphic representations offered by television news and print media between January and April 2020 in Spain and also with the main SARS-CoV-2 images released by the scientific community. The study concludes that the predominant imagery is closer to the representative patterns offered by television news, despite being a less scientific representation of the virus than the offered by the newspapers. Likewise, the representational patterns present two specificities to be highlighted: peplomers with a sharp ending giving aggressiveness to the virion and expressive facial features which are characteristic of humanisation or animalisation in the representation of the virion.