Ask HN: Would a temporary coronavirus section be useful here?

HN generally eschews tagging and categorization, because it's intrinsic to the site that it be non-siloed: everybody sees the same site. This has deep consequences for community: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

/ask and /show in the top bar are partial exceptions, but those are not exactly topic categories.

i think very much. There is a process for merging threads, if they are similar enough but "coronavirus" is too general of a tag for merging on that basis.

i wonder how much extra work would be required to branch topics off into "hyperthreads" or something like that.

You could suggest it as a new category for this site? https://bestofshowhn.com/

absolutely. great idea