Because being overly-alarmist about anything gains clicks.

Being overly alarmist about a disease especially so, if you’re right you get to claim the higher ground, if you’re wrong you get to claim “it could have been worst if we didn’t alarm”.

It’s a very easy way to virtue signal: “Look at me, I think about underlying risk, I care about people not abstract concepts like statistics, even one soldier left behind is one too many”

There’s a cycle of rampaging panic where people look at the same data and attribute more and more outrageous interpretations and it won’t end any time soon.