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Shock! Horror! Corona Virus Kills… Hardly Anyone
How the media scares us for profit.
Most people will be aware that the latest sensation being pushed by the media is the new coronavirus that started to spread among humans in the Wuhan province of China. Now lots of people are happily terrified they’re going to die of this terrible disease, so sales of face masks are soaring and companies are pulling employees out of supposedly high-risk locations.
Just like with SARS and H5N1, the media is busy pushing out a narrative designed to terrify people because it’s profitable to do so. The more frightened eyeballs that can be attracted to stare at a screen, the greater the advertising revenues that result. So the media amplifies what is in reality a trivial matter until it assumes global proportions and hundreds of millions of naïve citizens are scared out of their wits.
But let’s step back a moment and look at reality. Because reality is very, very different.
To date (Feb 1st 2020) fewer than 300 people have died worldwide from illness resulting from infection by the latest coronavirus. It’s taken nearly six weeks for the death toll to reach this level.
During the same six weeks, 127,000 people have died in road traffic accidents.
