Fear is often conceived as a simple emotion representing an organism’s response to some clear threat. But in practice very few of the threats faced in modern life are obvious. Even the COVID-19 virus was not, at first, something definitely fearful. This chapter uses early news coverage of COVID-19 to explore the social construction of fear. By analyzing the first four months of New York Times COVID coverage, from January through April 2020, the chapter shows how early fears of the novel coronavirus took shape, and whose interests that tended to favor. Findings indicate that fears of personal health and wellbeing were downplayed in this early coverage while fears of the potential economic costs of COVID were emphasized. Such emphasis grew from the more frequent quoting of CEOs, corporate spokespeople, and economists than public health officials, especially in February when the public’s attention and the amount of coverage increased. Thus, the chapter makes the case that early COVID news coverage enacted a kind of emotional agenda setting—preparing the public to find certain elements of the virus scarier than others, in ways that placed economic concerns ahead of fears about human health and safety.