The Madness of Crowds. Hysteria in the Age of the Internet. Or like some guy (and I wish I knew who) once said,
"occasionally, entire societies go batshit crazy".
^^ That is the charitable view. aka accidental hysteria. The other one is we are being played deliberately.
We are treating a hangnail with a chainsaw, destroying lives and jobs and social structures and most likely all our civil liberties,
enabling and cheering on vast government expansions of power, for a virus. A virus with a minuscule mortality rate.
Our ancestors survived polio, smallpox, scarlet fever and a host of other ills without antibiotics or anesthesia, and I suspect would be sickened to their core over how a bunch moderns willingly give up the country they built with their efforts.
"A Republic, if you can keep it."
I don't see anything wrong with slowing business down, keeping supply chains afloat and food growing, but just coasting through a highly communicable disease like this, to slow its spread.
Nothing in the response plan that anyone is publicly selling involves giving up a country or embracing Socialism.
There's some aholes over in Mordor on the Potomac that have a bullshit 1800 page bill full of pork and fluff and transgendered unicorn aborshins. Probably some gun control and 4A/5A/10A (hell, probably 3A too) breaches. And there isn't a single sane regular old human being that thinks such a response is responsible in a situation where public discourse is effectively impossible and the "Democracy" or "Republic" or whatever form of representation we have going on here is broken due to curfews and quasi-martial-law.
I'm glad humanity is past a place where doctors stuff leather masks full of posies and think that'll protect them from vapors that cause illness, and everyone else goes about their business with fatalism. Those guys handled the Black Plague the best they could. We've got our own to deal with. One hopes we can do better.
I hope in 200 years, humanity looks at our doctors and scoffs at their barbarous "treatments" in light of the new revelations discovered in the intervening time.
Our current state of science demonstrates that reducing human intercourse can dramatically slow transmission of this disease. And that treatment capability of our medical system is insufficient for a free for all outbreak. Maybe in the future there will be a better mechanism to deal with such a thing. But embracing social norms of 100-year gone societies that had so much wrong to them from a health perspective is no way to combat this disease.