The issue with pandemics has more to do with the number of people who get sick at once.
What a lot of the "It's not an issue until people are dying by the X level" people miss is that this is when it's already too late. The reason for the stiff reaction early on is that communities want to avoid that level of death and high rates of infection all at once. Disease, when out of control, spreads exponentially, and this may not be very noticeable for the first 85-90% of the upward curve outbreak, but in that last 10-15%, if the shit hits the fan, then lots of people die; and it's already too late.
It's not an overreaction if there is a heavy reaction and nothing crazy happens, it's an underreaction when something crazy happen and the amount of critically ill outstrips the hospital capacity. The reaction it takes that successfully stomps out any kind of sickness like this is the appropriate reaction. An overreaction would be something like firebombing Italy to burn the disease in the festering human bodies that contain them.
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