The coronavirus may have started in China, but the volume of news coverage about covid-19 in that country declined quickly as the death toll slowed.

A comparison of media coverage in a handful of major countries hit by the outbreak shows coverage generally in proportion to the mortality rate.

In countries where fatalities have been higher — Italy, France, the U.K. and U.S. — there have been huge spikes in volume and volatility of media coverage.

By contrast, the charts for China and Germany suggest that even fairly early in the crisis the volume of media coverage conveyed that those countries weren’t being hit has hard.

A note about the data: The volumes represent the daily number of news articles about coronavirus focusing on a specific country carried on Bloomberg.