Before revision:  We find that the national attention on Covid-19 mortality  is modelled accurately as a logarithmic or power law function of national daily Covid-19 deaths rates, implying generalisations of the Weber-Fechner and power law models of sensory perception to the collective .
After revision:  Semantic network analysis based on word co-occurrences reveals changes in the emotional framing of Covid-19 casualties that are consistent with this hypothesis. We also find that the national attention on Covid-19 mortality is modelled accurately as a logarithmic or power law function of national daily Covid-19 deaths rates, implying generalisations of the Weber-Fechner and power law models of sensory perception to the collective .