Abstract: Objective To explore the application and effectiveness of the agenda-setting theory of mass communication in emergency response for COVID-19. Methods The main contents of agenda-setting in media emergency response for COVID-19 were accordingly identified. The numbers of interview and media, the amount of news published were adopted to evaluate the effect of traditional media. The overall communication results of new media including WeChat and Weibo （a SINA Microblog service） were evaluated by using numbers of views and readers. The average views per news, average number of readers per news and rereading rate were further calculated to evaluate the agenda-wise effectiveness in releasing the activity tracks of confirmed cases. The epidemic service platform was evaluated based on the number of visits and visitors. An epidemic curve of COVID-19 in Shenzhen was used to explore the relationship between agenda-setting and epidemic trend. Results In the stage of ministerial, during the period from December 25,2019 to March 19,2020,municipal and provincial responses for COVID-19 control and prevention, the media response agenda was set at a proper time, facilitating voluntary communications between media and the public. In terms of traditional media, of the 806 reports published on COVID-19, 340 were on TV, 314 through the radio, and 152 in the newspaper. It can be observed that TV and radio were the most significant in communication. In terms of new media, despite the fact that the number of published articles on WeChat（343 articles） was less than that on Weibo （926 articles）, the views of WeChat（50.726 million） was much higher than those of Weibo （5.165 million）; WeChat articles intended to reveal the activity tracks of confirmed cases had the highest average views per article（706 thousand views） and average readers per article（539 thousand）。 With respect to the views of epidemic service platforms based on WeChat, epidemic query（279 thousand times） and epidemic information（220 thousand times） were top-ranked. Conclusion The COVID-19 media emergency response based on the agenda-setting theory is beneficial for fostering voluntary communication between media and the public. The new media, especially WeChat, has the most compelling impact to the public. Because of the biggest demand on the epidemic information for the public, more precise message about confirmed cases released has improved the emergency response towards COVID-19 in the whole society。

Key words: COVID-19, Media communication, Agenda-setting, Effective evaluation