The world is facing a race between controlling new and more infectious variants of coronavirus and implementing vaccinations: How can health authorities and governments most effectively communicate the need to engage more strongly in protective behavior to avoid a collapse of the healthcare system until vaccination programs are effective? In the first wave of the pandemic, citizens became engaged in 'flattening the curve' via powerful visualizations. Here, we use epidemiological modelling to

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... elop a new visual communication aid, 'buying time with hope', which reflects the pandemic trade-offs currently facing governments, authorities and citizens. Using a population-based experiment conducted in United States (N = 3,022), we demonstrate that this hope-oriented visual communication aid, depicting the competing effects on the epidemic curve of (1) more infectious variants and (2) vaccinations, motivates public action and communicates more effectively than fear-oriented visual communication, focusing exclusively on the threat of the new variants. Finally, using cross-national representative surveys from eight countries (N = 3,995), we document the urgent need to motivate public action to halt the spread of the new, more infectious variants. These findings not only provide public health authorities globally with a validated blueprint for health communication in a critical period of the pandemic but also provide general psychological insights into the importance of hope as a health communication strategy.