Should we ‘publish less’ on the pandemic?

Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, found that “increased engagement with media coverage of the outbreak” is a major driver of anxiety among people of all ages. “If people are engaged with a great deal of media, they are more likely to exhibit and report distress, but that distress seems to draw them further into the media,” Silver says. “It’s a cyclical pattern from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.”