Are what the news media, health agencies, and global governments communicating about the supposed nature and threat of Coronavirus markedly different from the broadcasting of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio drama from 1938? Do effects such as sports game cancellations and school closures prove causation?

As a teenager, I first heard Welles' War of the Worlds program while tuned into a retrospective radio show that featured broadcasts from the medium's 'Golden Era.'
-NW

The Fake News of Orson Welles
Peter Tanguette
National Endowment for the Humanities
Fall 2018, Volume 39, Number 4

[snip]

On October 31, 1938—as children across the country were preparing for an evening of trick-or-treating—Welles appeared at a press conference to explain a stunt of his own. The night before, the Mercury Theatre on the Air—CBS Radio’s incarnation of the fabled theatrical troupe Welles ran with producer John Houseman—had offered its fresh interpretation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds.

For much of its duration, the program was presented as a faux newscast. Consequently, Welles, who was then all of twenty-three, had somehow persuaded a portion of the public that Martians were annihilating Earthlings. The New York Times headline painted the picture: “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact.”

So, seated among a semicircle of eagerly scribbling reporters, Welles wore an oh-so-serious expression and spoke in sincere, thoughtful tones. “I know that almost everybody in radio would do almost anything to avert the kind of thing that has happened, myself included,” Welles said. “Radio is new, and we are learning about the effect it has on people. We learned a terrible lesson.”

John Landis, for one, isn’t buying it.

Landis is best known as the accomplished director of The Blues Brothers (1980) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), but he also knew Welles. In the 1980s, Landis was set to coproduce Welles’s unmade The Cradle Will Rock, which recounted the behind-the-scenes story of one of his most memorable productions at the Mercury Theatre. Landis says that he is unpersuaded by the performance Welles gave the day after The War of the Worlds.

“He was a brilliant and innovative man, and he milked it for all it was worth,” Landis says. “When they talked about that he was embarrassed by it, I don’t think so. . . . If you look at that press conference, he’s so contrite, and he’s just acting his brains out, and he’s so clearly delighted.”

Orson Welles - War Of The Worlds - Radio Broadcast 1938 - Complete Broadcast
David Webb
Dec 16, 2010
https://youtu.be/Xs0K4ApWl4g