This editorial illustrates how health promotion can tackle the COVID-19 threat and its societal impact.

Health promotion can help address COVID-19 by focusing on individual behavior change and disease management, organizational and societal interventions, and population-level policies. When persuading people to change their behavior, health promoters must do more than just inform individuals of risks and desired behaviors. They should create messages informed by theoretical models that communicate susceptibility, severity, outcome expectations, and self-efficacy. Additionally, because there is so much information circulating, individuals can feel overwhelmed and confused. Therefore, health and government sectors should coordinate key messaging. Not only should information be available to be helpful, it must also be understood, accepted, and applied. Thus, messages should consider the health literacy of the target population and communicate accordingly. Finally, to increase the likelihood of success, local community members and leaders must have knowledge to improve trust, understanding, and safety changes. Community engagement strengthens the capacity to handle disruptive effects of the pandemic.