You know that it is impossible to consume news and information that is strictly geographically relevant — every platform that carries relevant information to our daily needs will pull in word from somewhere else. Why is that? Because our little nook, our place in the shire, is affected by world events.

You do make a good point of focusing on what we can do. Fear of loss is a powerful motivator, we know it intuitively. We may be losing people to various diseases, but that is a known statistic. What we don’t know is who and what will succumb to the virus, and what strain it will put on our untested healthcare system. There are still plenty of pregnant women, elderly relatives, and others with chronic illnesses that need to get into and out of hospitals without another complication. In other words, it is the fear of an uncertain death that is haunting our decisions.

No single person is hyping the virus. It is getting our attention because unlike sales ads, partisan politics, and just about everything else we’ve been exposed to and have tuned out, this virus does ring true because it really has the potential to destroy our lives. And it seems to be doing that whether or not you actually contract the disease.