For people who are worried that other people are being made too anxious, this article by an expert in risk communication might be of interest:
“Fear Is Spreading Faster than SARS” – And So It Should!
From the article (which was written in 2003 when SARS was a growing risk):
The first half of our title was the headline of a recent New York Times article on SARS. The second half is a risk communication lesson that most health officials and many journalists have been slow to learn. It isn’t only about SARS. Regardless of the hazard, fear is a tool, not just a problem. The purpose of fear is to motivate precautions – that is, self-protective behaviors that diminish the risk of bad outcomes. To be useful, then, the fear has to outrun the thing that is feared; fear that lags behind its object is useless. Yet somehow the public is being told that it is wrong, irrational, panicky, or hysterical to be fearful of SARS just yet.
Public anxiety can lead to genuine panic or to astonishing resilience. The paradox is that efforts to squelch the anxiety (“allay the public’s fear” is the usual phrase) can actually induce the panic it aims to prevent. Resilience is likelier when authorities ally with the anxiety, harness it, and steer it instead of trying to prevent it. Of course even superb handling of the public’s fears may not prevent panic if the epidemic gets bad enough. There has often been some panic during the great epidemics of the past. But panic will be likelier and more widespread if the authorities have been minimizing the risk than if they have been acknowledging it candidly and compassionately.
This is partly about false positives and false negatives – what the medical profession calls “the worried well” and what we might appropriately call the complacent sick. One of the lessons the SARS epidemic has taught us, or retaught us, is that a few sick people who are insufficiently concerned (or insufficiently screened) can wreak havoc. It is true that anxious people sometimes imagine they have SARS when they don’t, much as medical students traditionally imagine themselves into whatever disease they are currently studying. And it is true that this is an irritation, a distraction, and an expense for the health care system, at a time when the system is already overburdened. But even thinking purely in medical terms, are false positives really too high a price to pay to reduce the number of false negatives – that is, to achieve a vigilant patient population less likely to shrug off a symptom or a voluntary quarantine?
The article is a long but interesting read. The basic argument is that a certain amount of fear is appropriate, and attempts to reassure people that there's nothing to worry about until it's certain things will get bad, are positively unhelpful. They prevent people from getting gradually ready to take the necessary precautions, and they cause more panic in the long run.
These threads have been so useful, and will stop being so very quickly if they are also being treated as comforting public service announcements rather than frank discussions which include a lot of thinking aloud, some speculation, theorising and so on. They contain an awful lot of useful links, careful explanations, useful information from people with valuable experience, too. No one is taking every line as some kind of gospel truth as to what's going to happen next.