if this were true, cardiovascular disease and cancer would be the top stories everyday, as they combine for tens of millions of deaths per year. the media focuses on novel fear because it's attention-getting, not rationally dire.

And you can't just blame this on the generic "media". They sell what the people want to buy. They report on novel fears because that is what attracts more attention from readers/viewers. The story about a murder is always going to get more attention than a dozen people dying of heart disease.

It isn't that the media doesn't care about these privacy issues. It is that people generally don't care about these privacy issues.

the point is that the pandemic isn't a bigger threat to our daily lives than common diseases for most people, yet we've blathered on about it like it's an imminent threat to everyone for over a year and a half. we don't do that for (other) respiratory infections or tuberculosis, for instance, which affect the same order of magnitude of people worldwide every year. this misfocus is acutely irrational (an availability/recency bias). the novelty only exacerbates the misfocus, it doesn't justify it in any way.

the pandemic isn't even a long-term threat in the way that concentration of power, as manifested by this privacy/surveillance issue, is for every person on earth (and the way climate change is for humankind on a multigenerational scale). it's just that the change is so relatively slow and incremental that we don't understand the severity of the threat until it's overwhelming. it's how we boil frogs so easily.