While I agree with the overall sentiment, in the context of a novel pandemic, downplaying the risks is far worse than overplaying them IMO.

The problem with that reasonning is that it applies to pretty much every "risk", without consideration of quality. What you're saying is "better safe than sorry".

I'm sure you wouldn't suggest putting everybody systematically in quarantine for a flu epidemic, every year, makes a lot of sense. Yet the death rates for influenza is much higher than coronavirus atm..

edit: much lower -> much higher

True, but the same claims are made about the other things you mention also.

Boy who cried wolf story comes to mind.

> While I agree with the overall sentiment, in the context of a novel pandemic, downplaying the risks is far worse than overplaying them IMO.

Probably true, as long as you're not one of the ones rounded up and sent to prison, er, I mean, quarantine.

Or the people who will lose their job because of the economic impact of an unnecessary panic.

Unfortunately, sickness and death also have an economic impact. I have no idea how to balance those two forces.

Overplaying increases the baseline of perceived risk, so you'll have to overplay it even more next time to provoke the same reaction. That's difficult, because once you're at "we're all going to die with 99.9% certainty", will people really care tomorrow when it's 99.99% or 99.999% the day after that?

It feels a bit like throwing antibiotics at everything. Sure, it's effective in the moment, but you're lowering the future effectiveness.