Ah yeah so the media went and bought up all the hand sanitizer lol. People buy bread and milk for snow storms. People are stupid.
I've definitely seen a wide variety of widespread national & local/state media approaches to COVID19 reporting so far...from really good, calm, measured, science-based to slanted, potential hysteria-inducing "reporting".
Some of the people in local & state goverment are "stupid people" that propagate hysteria; others are "not so stupid".
Not attempting to make this political at all. Some of the extreme measures that are being implemented have dubious ability to tangibly affect the overall pandemic unless other measures are also simultaneously implemented.
In the infectious diseases realm (where I work everyday) one analogy we commonly use when trying to maximally affect the problems of antimicrobial resistance and infection prevention is "squeezing the balloon"