Memories of the media's COVID Panic Porn. Widely disseminated, never retracted

I ran across an old Wired post from April, 2020, denouncing an article the Atlantic had run that week, and thought I’d read it. Lots there, but this will give you a taste of its tone and wild hysteria:

Georgia’s brash reopening puts much of the state’s working class in an impossible bind: risk death at work, or risk ruining yourself financially at home. In the grips of a pandemic, the approach is a morbid experiment in just how far states can push their people. Georgians are now the largely unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine, sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague.

So, how’d that prediction, and the similar media panic attacks on other states — Florida comes to mind — work out? Did the states that imposed draconian lockdowns on their citizens do better than those that quickly reopened? Did a wall of death descend on Georgia, as the Atlantic’s writer insisted it would? Well, as Casey Stengel said, “you could look it up”.

USA Facts Georgia New Cases, deaths