News

Is the news making us unwell?

Since the start of the pandemic I’ve been observing friends and family and their reactions to the virus. Broadly speaking they fall into two groups; at one end of the spectrum there are the insouciant, apparently unconcerned about a viral threat they think has been exaggerated; at the other are the corona-obsessives who have avidly consumed every scrap of information they can find – of which there has been no shortage. They’ve become minutely informed on everything from T-cells to lateral-flow tests; their lives have been subsumed under a tsunami of technical information. Of the two groups it is the wilfully ignorant who seem happier. The well-informed, who have become