In the Middle Age, people in a village got sick after eating bread. It turned out that a fungus had infested the local grains which made people get high fevers. A particular group of people did not get sick - those were old women at the outskirts of the village, too poor to afford bread.

Because noone in town knew about the relationship between the fungus and the bread that caused high fever, town people started to assume that those women were the reason for why people got sick. The church helped to spread the belief and eventually those women were called witches and so the witch hunt began…

We have not changed since our Middle Age ancestors. Today, with the outbreak of the coronavirus, the (Western) media uses facts about the virus to spin blockbuster stories. About 37,000 people are infected in 28 countries sounds dramatic. If you were to zoom in, 72% of cases are in Hubei Province, 99% of cases are contained in China.

Journalist also thirst for whistleblower stories, that they can use to frame China on how it suppresses free speech, and they love to criticize the inhuman situation in those Wuhan hospitals. They do not highlight though that Wuhan city has 11M people and that Hubei Province has the population size of France. Would we see no overwhelmed doctors, chaos and far-from-ideal-managed processes if such an outbreak happened in New York, Tokyo or Mexico City? Could the whistleblower story also be explained by the fact that authorities did not want to raise alarms until it was clear what they were dealing with? Somehow, scale and background information are not factored in.

The consequence is that around the world, people are irrationally hoarding supplies, they cancel trips to Asia, even if Asia isNOT China, and they start to develop xenophobia towards Chinese. I think that’s bad.

I had a hot debate with a journalist last night about this. He said that journalism is a tough competition. Journalists need to generate blockbusters, they need the clicks and they need to write in a way that correlates with what people value and what people want to believe in. It’s hard business and while they may feel similarly to what I think, they will happily take up such a virus outbreak and spin it to whatever will help them to sell the story - no matter what the consequences are.

It is so interesting to me to see that even with more access to information, more education and more empowerment, today in our digitized world, it is still those authorities (ie the church, the media) that paint reality and form public opinion.