From Hysteria to Hysteria

From Dennis Prager:

We go from hysteria to hysteria. And even that's not quite accurate. We now endure multiple hysterias at once. The latest, of course, is COVID-19, better known as the coronavirus. In addition to China, where the virus originated, major cities in Italy and Japan are in lockdown mode, and Japan has closed all its schools. In the United States, where, as of this writing, six people — most, if not all, of whom were already ill — have died, the states of Washington (where all six deaths occurred) and Florida and the city of San Francisco have declared states of emergency. Many international and domestic business conferences have been canceled, including:

—The Google News Initiative Summit in late April in Sunnyvale, California.
—The Microsoft MVP Global Summit March 15-20 in Bellevue and Redmond, Washington (now to be an online-only event).

—The Facebook Global Marketing Summit, March 9-12 in San Francisco.
—The MWC (Mobile World Congress) Barcelona, billed as "the largest mobile event in the world."

Amazon has asked its 798,000 employees to stop all nonessential travel, both domestic and international, immediately.

Meanwhile, according to Time, "U.S. stocks lost nearly 12% and $3.5 trillion was erased for U.S.-listed stocks. It was the worst week for stocks since the financial crisis in October of 2008." And the "yield on the 10-year Treasury note hit a record intraday low [last] Tuesday as coronavirus rocked risk markets and investors flooded into safe-havens," according to Markets Insider. If these trends continue, the world economy is likely to enter a recession, if not a depression. Unless the coronavirus becomes a worldwide mass killer, it will be fair to say that the hysteria over coronavirus will cause much more suffering than the virus.

All this leads to three questions:
1. Why aren't we seeing a sober, measured reaction to the virus?
2. What has caused this hysteria?

3. Why are so many people in panic mode?

Answer to question 1: Because people have lost all perspective.

This flu, like SARS and swine flu before it, has been given a name. Every year tens of thousands of people die of that season's generic flu. In the 2017-2018 flu season, in America alone, according to the CDC, about 61,000 people died of the flu. But because that flu didn't have a special name, no one other than individuals close to those who died from the flu knows or cares about any no-name flu. In 2003, there was hysteria over SARS, which also originated in China, and which killed a total of 774 people in 29 countries. (Read more.)

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