The COVID-19 crisis has been characterized by a rather intense "battle of narratives" presenting this pandemic as a threat to global peace and security, a threat to global food security, a "Chinese virus", a "turning point for globalization" or even "a God’s punishment". In other words, the COVID-19 pandemic has been described according to different frames that the audience received with varying frequencies. This study proposes to focus on one of these frames, namely the one which has emphasized the interactive link between COVID-19 and "environment". This is the construction of COVID-19 as an "environmental health" issue that this article has studied through the qualitative news frame analysis of written media in four European countries – Austria, Belgium, France, and Germany – during the global outbreak. This research argues that newspapers in all these four European countries have emphasized the link between COVID-19 and the environment through a large number of articles and framed COVID-19 as an environmental health issue according to five specific frames, which have been produced by specific actors and had concrete societal impacts in these countries.