The Tale of the (First) Great Pandemic Panic of 2020

“Grampy, please tell me the virus story again.”

I was tucking in my 7-year-old granddaughter when she asked for a bedtime story.

“Wouldn’t you rather read a book together? Maybe one of those Wimpy Kid books?’”

“No,” Rose said. “I want to hear about the sick Chinese lady on the cruise ship.”

“But sweetheart, you know that story makes Grandpa upset. Isn’t there another story you’d like to hear?”

“No! I wanna hear that one!”

So, I told it again, even though it brought back unpleasant media memories as clear as technical water washing the sea salt off stateroom windows.

It was Thursday, January 30, 2020 — a day that lives in my memory as the Great Pandemic Panic.

It started like any other day during the early stages of the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, or 2019-nCoV, or “Wuhan Virus.” I checked my news app for the latest numbers of dead and sick, both of which had increased dramatically overnight — the one, arithmetically, and the other, geometrically — and reading an article that asserted that surgical face masks don’t stop the virus, though they can undoubtably block aerosolized droplets of snot and spit.

Little did I know that seemingly trivial fact would set the stage for the day to come.

See, I’m a public relations guy for cruise lines, have been for 26 years now. And even though I’m suffused with cynicism, imbued with ennui and have exceedingly low expectations of human behavior, I still get out of bed every morning and survey the day ahead with a public relations professional’s jaundiced eye and a peculiar amalgamation of hope, neurosis and dread.

I arrived at work to find an email from my PR contact at Costa Cruises’ headquarters in Genoa, Italy, with a reactive statement in the typical “Itanglish” bad translation that seemed to indicate the line’s newest cruise ship, Costa Smeralda, was on lockdown at the port of Civitavecchia, Italy, because a guest, a 54-year-old female Chinese national, had presented at the ship’s infirmary with flulike symptoms the night before.

As I combed the statement for more elusive facts, I received an email from a journalist asking me if the story in the enclosed link was true. It linked to the British tabloid The Sun and the article’s typically breathless Murdochian headline was “PLAGUE SHIP: Coronavirus – 66 Brits among 7,000 people placed on lockdown on cruise ship after Chinese woman falls ill.” The article was illustrated with photos taken on board by guests and several shots from the shore by an Associated Press photographer. My favorite AP photo caption was “A passenger can be seen blowing his nose while others make phone calls.”

I sent the journalist the statement, then fielded a call from Carnival Cruise Line asking if they should forward all the queries about Costa they were receiving to me.

Thus, it began.

For the next four hours, I answered an unceasing stream of emails and phone calls, providing the statement and logging media contacts.

I set up a dashboard in our news monitoring platform and watched as the online and broadcast coverage spread faster than an E. coli smear on a warm Petri dish.

The story had all the elements required for a media feeding frenzy: This was potentially the first case of 2019-nCoV on a cruise ship (disease on the high seas!) — a brand-new ship (novelty, glamor!) — and over 6,000 people were being held onboard the ship (boredom, unease!) while a Chinese woman and her husband languished in isolation in the ship’s infirmary, awaiting fateful test results (suspense!).

And still the media questions kept coming as rumors were milled, phone interviews were given by guests and new information from Genoa became as scarce as White House press briefings.

Meanwhile, I had to explain to a reporter from a high-profile national business publication that it was absolutely not OK to attribute to me Costa’s statement in the form, “… said Buck Banks, spokesman for Costa Cruises.” I explained, A) I am not a spokesman, and B) it was a statement from Costa, not a direct quote from me. I was only mildly surprised that a reporter from a Tier-1 outlet would even suggest that, but such is the media environment we find ourselves in today (see “Petri dish” above).

Finally, a document arrived from Genoa that contained answers to many — though not all — journalist questions I had fielded so far. I sent it to the writers who had contacted me earlier, and the pace of queries slowed as we all waited for the momentous test results that would mean either the first case of Wuhan coronavirus on a cruise ship or something infinitely less appealing to media.

About 2:30 p.m. I started getting questions about reports that the patient had the common flu, not coronavirus. By 3 p.m. I had received a final statement from Costa HQ confirming the ship had been cleared.

And just like that, it was over. No more calls, no more emails. Just the deafening silence that follows the sudden death of a cruise news story.

In just those few hours, online and broadcast media outlets across the United States and Canada had produced 1,244 stories about the first possible coronavirus case onboard a cruise ship. Those stories had a combined potential reach of 1,690,966,998 readers and viewers.

Given that the total population of the United States and Canada at the time was only about 361 million, that meant that every man, woman, child and nonbinary person in North America could have been exposed to the story five or more times between when the story broke in Europe in the wee hours of the morning and when it ended with those disappointing non-newsy test results in midafternoon.

The North American media machine had gone from a cold start to overdrive, cranking out “news” based on the aggregation of another outlet’s “coverage” of another outlet’s “coverage” of a bad translation of the original Italian on-the-ground reporting. It was as if this great lumbering media beast had been poked awake and brought all of its power and reach into focus on what was, in the end, a nothing-burger of a nonstory.

The Pandemic Panic of 2020 had petered out, though the coronavirus coverage continued.

“The end,” I said to Rose. “Now please don’t ever ask me to tell that story again.”

“I like that story,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because it had a happy ending,” said Rose. “The Chinese lady didn’t die, and everybody got to go home. Good night, Grampy.”

Of course, at the time I knew there were another 789 Chinese nationals on the ship, and since the incubation period of the virus was thought to be as long as 12 to 14 days, there was still plenty of time for another — probably inevitable — Pandemic Panic.