Tra pandemie annunciate e vere pandemie: dalla SARS alla COVID-19

In 2020, after almost twenty years of announced pandemic risks, COVID-19 the first “real” pandemic of the new century irrupts into our societies causing major disruptions of everyday life and challenging health governance at global and national levels. This article reviews the management of an epidemic of the recent past ̶ SARS ̶ in order to gain explorative insights for the present. With regard to SARS, through the adoption of measures for the management of the epidemic risk, the institutional communication has succeeded in preventing citizens' concerns from turning into social alarm. The current experience reveals a different picture. On the one hand, it shows the debacle of the international system of governance of pandemics, and, on the other, the difficulty of the national actors to reassure citizens about the ability of the system to govern the emergency, leaving room for the alarm to dominate the public discourse.