Richard sent me a thoughtful message this afternoon: “Jon, if you would like to see where the coronavirus/COVID-19 is going and see the up to the minute statistics from the world over, go to ncov2019.live.

Richard was as good as his word, you can keep a live minute-by-minute count of corona vises cases – sick, recovered, deceased from all over the world live and all day long.

The site is updated every few seconds.

When I looked there were 199,291 confirmed cases, 7,970 total deceased, 6,028 total serious, 81,109 total recovered, and 143 out of 195 countries in the world infected.

I thanked Richard, but I said it was actually a horrifying idea for me to check in on a website like that and stay up to the minute in corona stats the world over. I got a chill down my spines. Once a day is more than good enough for me.

Managing to stay grounded during this crisis for me means managing the amount of information I receive, and where from.

This is really important if I am to remain healthy and productive – and, yes, sane – in the traumatic and unsettling rain of information 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on our phones, on our screens, computers, on the radio, in the air.

A generation ago, we would have read about the coronavirus once a day, in the morning or evening.

Some of us would have watched an evening news broadcast, most people did.  The virus story would have been seven to fifteen minutes out of less than 30.

To be bombarded by commentary, death, sickness and argument hundreds, if not thousands of times a day is neither healthy nor necessary for me. I can only imagine what it does to the brain or the heart.

The news might be on all the time, but it doesn’t change all of the time.  All that shouting you hear is just filler posing as news. So here’s what I do to manage the flow of information around this crisis, and I am a former journalist who loves his craft.

I watch the news once in the morning after breakfast for ten or fifteen minutes. I check it once more around noon, I just glance at headlines. And I watch it a third time right before dinner, and not after again.

If I see something interesting that grabs my eye, I’ll read it.

Although the news is available all the time, it has to be filled with lots of commentary and junk, because there is rarely any real news to fill all that time. I never watch MSNBC or Fox News, I’d rather skip ideologues claiming to be journalists. There is a big difference.

I scan the headlines in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. Sometimes, I look at the headlines of the BBC News, their foreign coverage is very good. I check out Fox News once in a while because I should, but the array of angry old white people just wears me down.

I work hard to be well-informed, but I don’t wish to be over-informed. I never argue politics with anybody, and I recognize that news cycles are hungry, but I don’t have to be drawn in with them.

I call them the News Zombies. When politics or the coronavirus comes up, their eyes glaze and they are often either angry or stuffed with arcane quotes and observations nobody real cares about but them.

I never watch the news after dinner or before bedtime.

I never listen to panels stuffed with pundits who see the world from the vantage point of their big  (the butts sitting in Washington, sometimes LA, sometimes New York City. Since few journalists go anywhere any more or talk to anyone in person, I pay little attention to panels of commentators.

I do like the commentary after the debates, I like to compare their assessments with my own. My favorite is David Axelrod, he is intelligent and experience and calm.

But I am careful not to watch or listen to too much.

I want to know what is happening, but  I’m happy to draw my own conclusions about what I saw. Nobody knows exactly what is going to happen, nobody can do anything about it.

But I decline to be a prisoner of the news. It works for me, and I will use it as much as I need it, and not a minute more. I doubt I will get the coronavirus, but the amount of angry media streaming through my life all day could be fatal.