Coverage of the fall out from the coronavirus is saturating Australia's media, drowning out all other issues, according to analysis by Streem media monitoring.
Last week there were four times more stories mentioning COVID-19 than all other issues combined.
Prime minister Scott Morrison usually appears in up to 5% of stories in a big week. The bushfires were mentioned in nearly 30% of stories when they were bad.
But the coronavirus was above 80% on some days last week.
That means there's little to advertise against that's not coronavirus related.
The web traffic to news sites is surging along with the interest in the pandemic.
Nielsen says the average audience of the top ten news websites in Australia has grown by more than half (54%) in the wake of the pandemic. Seven of the top ten online news sites attracted more than 5 million people in the week of March 16-22 March.
Analyst Conal Hanna at Streem says people have for years used terms such as "wall-to-wall" or "blanket coverage but until that has never been defined.
"We now know what a story running at near-saturation levels looks like," he says.
"Coronavirus has reached an unprecedented level of modern media dominance by both being immensely newsworthy in itself, but also by undermining every other significant topic of interest.
"As shutdowns associated with the virus broaden, the range of other topics available to media narrows.
"This creates challenges for advertisers, who basically cannot avoid coronavirus-related content."
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