"No such thing as overreaction to a crisis like this" is such a weird talking point. Of COURSE you can overreact to just about anything. More importantly, some reactions are counterproductive or can create problems worse than the crisis at hand, especially over the long term.
Effective crisis management is all about keeping a cool head and thinking things through. Risks and rewards, costs and benefits, must still be measured even though priorities have understandably changed. Draconian measures aren't always wrong, but they're not automatically right.
Many arguments about over- or under-reaction really boil down to arguments over what priorities should be, and how the costs of dramatic action should be measured. It's possible, and vital, to ask about those costs even if the severity of the crisis is not in serious dispute.
That's the thing about crisis situations: they might increase the value of some benefits and even reduce the costs, as people band together and work or sell for less than normal, but they don't make costs go AWAY. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, not even in a crisis.
One of the reasons we deal with so many manufactured and exaggerated crises is because opportunists think they can induce people to forget about costs and benefits if they induce panic or make people think they are "at war." Invoking a wartime mindset is very popular rhetoric.
Reassigning priorities does not make costs go away. Politicians cannot make them disappear on demand. Crisis might make us more willing to pay a high cost to receive some benefit, but that is a rational calculation, very different from arguing that nothing would be overreaction.
The costs also do not disappear if you "socialize" them and get angry at anyone who dares to notice the cost is still being paid, unfairly, and perhaps with greater suffering over the long term. Politicians constantly try to do this. It's one reason politicized economies fail.
Even in a crisis, marginal costs can still make tiny improvements too expensive to be worth the effort. Heavy investment in an immediate problem can leave us without the resources to face the next problem, or even create a problem that explodes as surprisingly as the current one.
We take many of the benefits we receive in our advanced society for granted, to the point where we don't even think of them as benefits - witness how arguments about whether the average person is "poorer" today than a generation ago are usually conducted.
That means we may not fully appreciate the scale of the costs we are about to pay for dramatic action or over-reaction, or how those costs can put more lives at risk over the long term. If you don't appreciate what you have, then any new benefit seems worth paying any price for.
It's not wrong to keep an eye on all of those factors and plan accordingly. No, we don't want to under-react to a crisis, and some of them might call for actions that seemed unthinkable yesterday, but it is ALWAYS possible to overreact, and sometimes it's dangerous. /end
