The intelligent ones aren't freaking out but are computing
* economic impact of fear of a pandemic
* economic impact of shutdown of > 60,000,000 people in china to the rest of the world
* economic impact of panic of people not educated enough to judge real risk of becoming infected
* media inertia
* china specific cover-up tendency
* actions in china
* 2nd and 3rd derivative effects of fear of a pandemic (i.e. delayed/missing deliveries of required medicines)
* fear-caused outage of food etc., since the delivery chain may collapse if fear raises into a critical level
etc.pp.
In other words: from my POV (and my peers), nobody really fears the virus itself but the effect it causes to the social environment.
