The appearance of SARS-CoV-2, its rapid spread and mutations, have generated a strong impact on the health system, the economy, academic progress and lifestyles in general, for which different countries had to adopt social isolation as a preventive measure, which generated consequences in the mental health of its population, in this covid-19 pandemic, the protection measures against the disease and the policies imposed by the government must be known; however, the media also reports on deaths and the shortage of health services, but their impact on the mental health of the population is ignored.An explanatory study was carried out with observable variables, where 541 people selected with a non-probabilistic sampling participated. They answered a sociodemographic form and the scales: Mental Health Inventory-5 (MHI-5) and Fear of Covid-19 Scale. The data was processed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 25 and Macro PROCESS programs for SPSS; Linear regression and bootstrapping of 10,000 simulations were used, with the aim of determining whether fear of covid-19 contagion acts as a mediator between exposure to news about the pandemic and mental health in the Peruvian population.Taking as a result that fear of covid-19 has a total mediating effect between exposure to news about the pandemic and mental health in the Peruvian population, the number of hours watching and/or listening to information about covid-19 is a good predictor of the mediating variable fear of covid-19 (β= .75; t = 3.77, p<.001**); in turn, this has a predictive effect on mental health (β= -.24; t = -13.57, p<.001**); however, the number of hours of exposure to covid-19 information did not have a positive direct effect on mental health (β= -.10; t = -1.184, p=.23).