COVID reporting doesn't seem much different to me than other pandemic reporting. I read about SARS. I read about MERS. I read about Coronavirus in its early days in exactly the same way (and thought exactly the same thing, "interesting curiosity, that sounds like it really sucks for some other country").
The difference is that this time, it started killing Americans in America, so got a little bit more attention than some weird disease in Hong Kong or the Middle East.
