The media-created COVID "panic".
Your statement regarding COVID circulating before the major outbreaks occurred in the West, along with your statements about the media's role in pandemic awareness, implies that there was nothing to worry about, because the virus was already here, and the worry was only caused by the media focus on the issue.
This is what you appear to be saying. This is completely wrong.
The virus was most likely already circulating in the West before those major outbreaks, yes; but the pandemic was not caused by media focus. It was caused by the fact that viral outbreaks follow exponential growth. This means they start of slowly, with a few sporadic cases here and there; and then gradually build up momentum, getting larger and larger, until suddenly there are tens of thousands of new cases each day. At that point, the outbreak becomes impossible to ignore and impossible to miss.
The media did not create the outbreak, nor the panic about the outbreak. It was the scale of the outbreak itself which created the panic in all sections of society, and rightly so.
I would argue that the media did the opposite in the early days: there was a disastrous lack of panic in the media. The media tended to discount the pandemic in the early days when the outbreaks first hit China, and discount the possibility that it might hit the West.
Even the scientific experts said this, and they got that wrong. And the media just reported what the experts said, that there was no need to worry.
I distinctly remember when there was the first massive outbreak in Wuhan, and the whole city of Wuhan was placed in lockdown, the scientific experts in the UK were saying there was very low risk to Britain, and this Chinese outbreak was nothing to worry about.
It was this lack of panic and lack of response in the early days that was a huge mistake, a mistake made by the Western scientific experts as well as the Western media.
Once the first Wuhan outbreak occurred, the experts and media should have been raising the alarm, so that we might start preparations early, like ramping up production of masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospital use. Hospital PPE was in terrible short supply for the first 6 to 12 months of the pandemic, due to lack of preparation, and due to a lack of panic and lack of any sense of alarm.
I hope we have learned a lesson from this, so that when the next pathogen jumps from animals into humans, and we get another Wuhan somewhere in the world, governments around the world will be more on the ball in terms of early response.
Edited by Hip, 21 January 2023 - 12:26 AM.