We've had serious problems with mass delusions such as ant-vax, chem trails and pizza-gate propagating through social media since long before Covid. Of course now there are similar memetic contagions that are Covid related such as the 5G conspiracy theories, but crazies have got to crazy. If they weren't crazying about this they'd be crazying about something else.
It's the first time in history we've had unregulated, largely uncensored social media involved with a _real pandemic_. People can make up anything about this situation and spread it to whoever at light speed.
Maybe it's you who are delusional if you think there hasn't been any hysteria lately, especially around Covid19?
https://books.google.com/books/about/Memoirs_of_Extraordinar...
The Premier of Victoria locking down the entire state with tiny measures of case numbers? Continually changing news stories and narratives? The demonetization of any challenge to the State narrative as conspiracy theory. Doctors like the ones in Bakersfield or the silence of Scott Atlas's social media.
Sweden, and everything that entails (what you think, what the media tells us, what's actually true).
We have never seen this type of response to a virus before in all of human history. The culmination of both fast travel technology with media technology is causing a massive diaspora of conflicting facts and information with media and corporate giants attempting to control every aspect of what's true and what is not.
This is absolutely mass hysteria.
On the other hand, more than 1/4 million dead in the US by year end from Covid.
None of these studies seem to be taking into account the psychological contagion that's spreading on an international scale. I really think 10 years from now, we'll be looking at 2020 as the first example of global moral panic and mass hysteria.