As With SARS And H1N1, The Media Is Crying Wolf Over The Coronavirus

But this time, as in Aesop’s famous fable, the wolf is very real. And it’s hungry.

Panic! at the Costco (source)

At least a quarter of the tweets I see about COVID-19 on Twitter are from naysayers who think that the virus is no big deal, that the media’s essentially using it for clickbait in the neverending quest for revenue. They point out how reporters ran around with their metaphorical heads on fire about SARS, MERS, and especially the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, all of which were sorta bad, but never catastrophic. So why the heck should we pay the least attention to the doomsaying media today?

Because this time, the wolf is real. We’re looking at a very real likelihood of a pandemic that might actually compare with the 1918 H1N1 influenza that killed up to fifty million people.

Sorry, Leonidas, but that spear won’t work so well on a virus.

How do we know that this time is different from all the rest, especially given that COVID-19 has only killed about 3,000 people, and that influenza killed eleven times that many — 34,000 — just in the 2018 flu season? This time’s different because COVID-19:

• appears to be more contagious than influenza, though both are transmissible…