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Journeyman TV: Perspectives on the Pandemic: A Conversation with Dr. John Ioanniddis, Stanford University, March 23rd, 2020
IOANNIDIS: You have on top of that a very acute situation, a situation of perceived crisis, a situation of crisis. You have media following every step and every second what is going on with every patient, with every single death. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if the sixty million deaths that happen every year on this planet we had a meter counting them, one by one, and having stories written for each one of them? It would be horrible.
I mean, we have gone into a complete panic state measuring so far, a sizable number of deaths but nothing close to the total cumulative mortality that we see both in this country and around this world. I think that panic component and that over-emphasis of media attention is probably making things worse. We do want to sensitize people to follow instructions, to try to keep the public health measures, to shelter in place, if they have sheltered in place, but we don’t want to get them scared. We don’t want them to get into panic. This doesn’t really help...

There’s also a lot of that media halo that is surrounding this whole adventure. If you just go to Google - I did that, and I just typed “coronavirus,” and you get something like nine billion results. If you type influenza, you get something like a hundred million results. So, I think that we have really a pandemic of news stories and news clips and anecdotes about coronavirus. And I don’t want to diminish its importance, but we need to get solid evidence along with the anecdotes, at a minimum...
https://www.journeyman.tv/film_documents/7814/transcript/