They blew up the economy, destroyed parts of it utterly, over panic over a pandemic. So far covid19 is looking like an additional flu season in size and effect, with somewhat different demographic effects -- covid19 is less dangerous for young people and maybe more dangerous for old people. We have 30,000 - 60,000 deaths per year due to flu and nobody has every suggested shutting down the economy because of it.
This is going to be studied for centuries in the same category as "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". I think it's also the first really big internet induced panic. All of the media, even the media that I follow and that I more-or-less approve of, gets more clicks if they provide clickbait, i.e. headlines to articles that grab the attention. I keep saying "we live in a clickbait world", and this panic has been largely caused, I believe, because it works for the media to exaggerate events like this. If they have a calm and measured response, nobody clicks. If they say "OMG We're ALL Going to Die!!!" they get plenty of clicks. There are no brakes.
I can see lots of things that need to be fixed when this dies down -- the execrable response of the CDC and the FDA for one thing -- but in addition we as a culture need to figure out how to stop clickbait from blowing up our civilization.
