SA, I don’t watch telly, nor listen to the radio, nor read any “news” papers, nor read their websites beyond following commenters links to individual articles.
But in mid March, I spent nearly a week with some friends who have the telly on, always on a “news” channel. Just hours and hours and hours of coverage of essentially nothing but covid-19, day after day. And I learned not a thing from it. From the relatively tiny amount of time I’d spent reading your comments and Squonk’s, following links from those comments, and looking at the trends at sites such as worldometers.org – I’d learned more than the TV “news” channel had to tell me; it literally never surprised me once.
That’s because most of the TV coverage was either what politicians had to say, or random members of the public! That’s what I mean by hype. Here’s advice from Richard Stallman, which I endorse:
Don’t watch TV coverage of Covid-19! — by Richard Stallman:
https://www.stallman.org/articles/dont-watch-covid-tv.html
And I did say that I didn’t really mind the hype. I just mean it’s not for me.