And even if the media didn’t, politicians did. To the point that nearly every country in the world has passed economic and financial aid measures that probably exceed anything they’ve done in the past, certainly during peacetime, and globally the world has put more resources into mitigating the second order effects through all sorts of programs than it almost certainly ever has before.
This whole narrative about how dissenters are not heard, when they are parroted the loudest is ridiculous. Even the Scientific A,Eric an article puts the great barrington declaration, with absolutely no scientific backing, with 0 footnotes and references, and a signee list that is completely unvetted, on equal footing with the John Snow memo which has vetted every signee, has references to actual papers littered through it to the point that the text in footnotes probably exceed the entire scientific content of the GBD, if not the entire GBD itself.
This reminds me of the French economist Frederic Bastiat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen". The media (tv, newspapers and internet) were all hyper-focused on the number of deaths (initially) and later number of cases but always failed to take into account secondary consequences like those you mention.
Link to Bastiat's essay: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/T...