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jimrandomh comments on Vote Qualifications, Not Issues - Less Wrong
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I interpret what happened with H1N1 a little differently. Before it was known how serious it would be, the media started covering it. Now even given that H1N1 was relatively harmless, it is quite likely that similar but non-harmless diseases will appear in the future, so having containment strategies and knowing what works is important. By making H1N1 sound scary, they gave countries and health organizations an incentive to test their strategies with lower consequences for failure than there would be if they had to test them on something more lethal. The reactins make a lot more sense if you look at it as a large-scale training exercise. If people knew that it was harmless, they would've behaved differently and lowered the validity of the test..
This looks like a fully general argument for panicking about anything.
It isn't fully general; it only applies when the expected benefits (from lessons learned) exceed the costs of that particular kind of drill, and there's no cheaper way to learn the same lessons.
Are you claiming that this was actually the plan all along? That our infinitely wise and benevolent leaders decided to create a panic irrespective of the actual threat posed by H1N1 for the purposes of a realistic training exercise?
If this is not what you are suggesting are you saying that although in fact this panic was an example of general government incompetence in the field of risk management it purely coincidentally turned out to be exactly the optimal thing to do in retrospect?
I have no evidence that would let me distinguish between these two scenarios. I also note that there's plenty of middle ground - for example, private media companies could've decided to create an unjustified panic for ratings, while the governments and hospitals decided to make the best of it. Or more likely, the panic developed without anyone influential making a conscious decision to promote or suppress it either way.