Media Hype?

So recent figures of the world toll from the Covid 19 pandemic estimate it to be a relatively insignificant 205,000 as of Saturday nite.

205,000 out of a world population of an estimated 8 billion? That's hardly scary for a global panic of the proportions we have been drummed into enduring by the authorities.

World population was considerably smaller at the end of WWI when the Spanish Flu was claimed to have cost an estimated 20-50 million lives.

Did the presence of cell phones and electronic media hype in our current world stampede the human herd into an unwarranted level of panic?