Well, I was mostly curious about a timeline. I checked out https://archive.4plebs.org/pol and I see OPs with "covid" in it from mid-February 2020, but not earlier, and those all refer to newspaper headlines. So I cannot establish your timeline. And by that time, ordering from Aliexpress had already become a problem and the Fed had announced they would create trillions of dollars. Those things are already indicative of panic, at least among bureaucrats. They did those things, at least officially, because of panic, and for most lower level government employees the panic must've been real. I do get your point about hysteria and it wouldn't surprise me if that was an FBI op; I do believe they took it over and have some evidence of this on my computer. The thing is, I pay so little attention to the MSM that it's hard for me to tell where the hysteria spread first. I noticed a serious fear among normies in late February 2020 when Italy started locking down, and before that, Covid was referred to simply as "the virus", so people were most definitely being programmed already.

It's important to document things like these, I'm sure a lot of people are interested.