If you saw some of the videos from India of their hospitals being overwhelmed and of people being given welding gas for oxygen because they couldn’t produce pure gas fast enough you might not have considered it an overreaction. They were cremating so many people at once it was a major contributor to air pollution during one major outbreak.

The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.