The bad news, fearmongering, pessimism, empty market shelf pictures, etc clogging my otherwise interesting forward thinking RSS feeds feels like a case of the

The bad news, fearmongering, pessimism, empty market shelf pictures, etc clogging my otherwise interesting forward thinking RSS feeds feels like a case of the hiccups. People just want to rally around something - you've now got access to more prompts for conversation with complete strangers under looming conditions that appear to threaten your species. There is also a reverse psychology element in your biased Media Mogul Controlled "News" telling you to stay away from other people for a few weeks (when authority announces the end of this phase there will be a burst of interaction and crowded events to restore social equilibrium ). Since we all learned through standardized curriculum grade school about large fractions of past populations dying off to disease spread - all of this is ancient memory tellling us to be careful.