This paper describes the indicators of the emotional tone of newspapers daily news about coronavirus epidemic, published in various countries at the beginning of the epidemic. The total sample is 12,000 news entries published between 1st and 30th March 2020 in Italian, German, French and Russian languages. Among the countries under consideration, the most stable tone of the published news was observed in Russia, the predominantly negative tone of news records was in France, and positive tone was found in Italy. It is shown that the emotional tone of news was strongly related with the increase in the pandemic indicators, and was less related with the absolute indicators of its spread. The emotional tone of the press was stronger determined by the global events associated with the pandemic than by the spread within their own country. Three to 4 days was the size of the sliding window during which the press maintained the tone of the published news. Hierarchical regression method was used for built models for predicting the tone of the next day's press for each of the analyzed countries: France (R2 = 0.78), Italy (R2 = 0.75), Germany (R2 = 0.76), Russia (R2 = 0.85). The most relevant predictors were identified for each model. The most significant contribution for France and Italy was made by the parameters of the spread of the epidemic in the world in the previous 3 days and the emotional tone of the local media in the previous 3 days. The indicator of the emotional tone of the press in the previous 4 days and the emotional tone of the Italian media in the previous 1−2 days had a great explanatory power for Germany. In Russia, one can note the impact of global indicators of the spread of the epidemic and the emotional tone of the media in previous days.