Not to be sneezed at, but not a calamity

Aghastly viral infection that can turn deadly when it attacks your respiratory system seeps across national borders. Millions of people are affected. Hundreds of thousands will be hospitalised and tens of thousands of unvaccinated sufferers, including hundreds of New Zealanders, look certain to die.

Such a frightening scenario is vividly recognisable to anyone who has caught the tsunami of local media coverage of Covid-19.

We’re doomed.

But wait. The seemingly apocalyptic description is not of the novel virus first identified this year in China but the garden-variety influenza that has more or less been with us forever.

As Canada’s Centre for Research on Globalisation recently noted, even allowing for the apparently well-placed fears about the ultimate course of the latest coronavirus, there’s another disaster here in fuller view. ‘‘It can be easily spread and will especially strike the young and the elderly,’’ the institute notes in an advisory. ‘‘But this is not what has been described as the Wuhan virus. The common flu is far deadlier.’’

The common flu also makes for less interesting headlines. Even the fact that large numbers of people do not even bother getting vaccinated against it isn’t really seen as such a big news deal.

Thus the illness that causes up to five million severe cases around the world each year has played a decidedly second fiddle to the latest outbreak and its as yet unknown long-term consequences.

What can be quantified at this point is the presence of yet another virus in the offing – a doomsday style of media coverage that sort of mimics the way the weather is reported, all flaming optics and viral icons dotted across interactive maps that pulse in kaleidoscopic colours underneath frenzied headlines.

This frenzied style dates back at least 21 years to another virus, of sorts, the much-ballyhooed Y2K glitch, which was also known as the millennium bug.

Y2K was the disaster-in-waiting caused by computer programs representing fourdigit years being supposedly unable to distinguish between 2000 and 1900. Without corrective action, it was predicted, computers would freeze, planes fall from the sky, nuclear missiles accidentally launch etc.

Nor was the world short in stumping up in response: by one estimate, $450bn in today’s currency was spent on staving off the impending apocalypse.

Except it didn’t happen. Zilch. It was as if Noah had spent the previous few months renting his garments, warning of the imminent global deluge and packing up his ark with two of every kind, and then all that happened was a few showers in Canterbury and a bit of a sprinkling across the Hutt Valley.

That way too went the threatened swine flu pandemic, which was initially reported to have the potential to cause 51,500 trans-Tasman deaths alone and an economic contraction of 18 per cent. A more accurate assessment would now appear to put that figure a little closer to zero – roughly the same body count of local victims in the case of the widely anticipated avian flu pandemic.

And on it has gone. The global financial crisis of 2008 was often cast at the time as a likely rerun of the Great Depression.

The election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016 was cast as the end of democracy as we know it. In a similar vein, much coverage of climate change turns on ever-gloomier predictions of the sparse amount of time left until the planet sizzles.

All or most of the above, especially the latest emergency, are certainly solemn subjects worthy of urgent attention. But by turning that attention to worst possible outcomes, the most the average media consumer can hope for is a massive dose of passive dread.

And when the worst-case scenario fails to happen as predicted, which is usually the case, the credibility of those predicting the calamity-in-waiting also takes another wallop.

OK, that’s hardly as nasty an experience as having Covid-19 – or indeed the common flu – but it’s not pretty all the same.