Hello, welcome to Media Roots Radio.

Today, this is going to be a Robbie Martin solo episode with a guest.

Abby is on vacation right now.

And our guest today on Media Roots is Emma Fiala, editor for The Mind Unleashed,

and formerly work with Mint Press News, Empire Files, and anti-media.

Emma has been doing an excellent job delivering through updates on social media and other places

like the Mine Unleash, delivering updates about the coronavirus,

and has been focusing on the outbreak since January.

For people who listen to this podcast and who know and understand how overblown media coverage

can be about things and how much they hype these things up, Let's just walk the listener through some of these

previous hyped up disease outbreaks. So right before 9-11, actually, people that may not remember

this, but the West Nile virus was on everybody's minds and was going to be the new big disease.

Since 1999 in New York City, where West Nile virus originated, only 2,000 people

total died of West Nile virus in the United States. MERS, another hyped up disease. To date,

there have been 2,500 laboratory confirmed cases of MERS total. It's like worldwide. And that disease actually has a very

high death rate of 34%. But there weren't that many cases of it worldwide. SARS, which is probably

the closest thing to the current coronavirus strain that's going around right now, had 774 deaths worldwide with a 9.6% fatality rate.

All of these diseases, you know, were extremely hyped up through the media.

They were described as if they were going to be potentially apocalyptic.

And they all sort of came and went without too much, you know,

they were never declared pandemics. The death rates were relatively low worldwide, didn't get

anything close to the influenza or Spanish flu pandemics. This coronavirus strain that has sort of

...