I’m getting the sense it’s what HN and perhaps more mainstream groups think too — that people are too weak to defend themselves against intellectual manipulation, and that democracy needs a special helping hand from the intellectual class.

The strong sense of the critique isn't quite fair. It wouldn't be right to call every political activist an elitist, even though they often think people are being intellectually manipulated and always think that democracy needs their special helping hand.

Yeah I'm sure they consider blind, raging panic they're trying their hardest to stoke to be "socially useful" somehow.

Well, that part I think they've actually made pretty explicit. The general public isn't taking coronavirus seriously enough (which I agree is true!), so it's their job to try and make the public more scared. Which is really obnoxious to those of us who live in a county that takes it as seriously as possible, let me tell you.

If they want to be "responsible" they need to be preparing the public to 50-60K dead for the year, which would be a normal haul of a heavy flu season. With extraordinary measures already in place (and with selective lifting of the measures in locales where infection is moderate), it seems to me that's where we'll end up. IOW, people who would die of the flu complications, will die of COVID19 and lower respiratory problems instead. Trouble is, nobody pays any attention to how many people die of flu complications per year. That number for lower respiratory diseases, for instance, is 160K per year in the US, without any virus (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929#chronic-low...). So it is possible that _fewer_ people will die of lower respiratory stuff because all the stops are being pulled when caring for them.

As to making people take it seriously, I don't think that's their primary motivation at all. As of yesterday, Cuomo himself admitted that there is a lot of unused ventilator capacity in NY. Meanwhile the press is reporting that they're running out of beds and ventilators, possibly causing people to freak out and leave NY, dragging disease to where it has not yet proliferated. This is extremely irresponsible.

On one hand, it's a harder problem than you're giving it credit for. We're likely to end up with a death toll of a heavy flu season or a bit above, but that's because the country's taking it seriously, building out the required healthcare capacity and taking extreme mitigation measures to make sure there's time to do it. New York has unused ventilator capacity now, and will likely be able to source enough ventilators to keep up even with their peak, but that's only helpful because they've worked at breakneck pace to remove every other obstacle to scaling up the healthcare system.

On the other hand, your last point does reflect a real problem with the media's strategy here. Gross manipulation doesn't allow the media to effectively communicate the subtle distinction between "this is an emergency, we must act urgently or New Yorkers will think they've been hit with the plague" and "our emergency response measures are largely expected to work, it will be tragic but not the end of New York".