When a 21-year-old former student opened fire inside his school in Austria’s second-biggest city earlier this week, killing 10 people, it didn’t take long for the Alpine country’s press council to call on journalists to show restraint when reporting about the victims and their families.

The COVID-19 surge caused by the omicron variant means once-reliable indicators of the pandemic's progress are much less so, complicating how the media is able to tell the story.