spiritual nonsense so they can cope
Excluding a talk on religions, the placebo effect of believing in God, Allah, Budha, can be a strong support for anybody. If you believe in you, you know that a million thousand accidents can kill you in a second, or your job can be affected by a zillion factors you can't control. If you believe in money, you'd be pretty ignorant not to understand that many of the previous factors can affect you radically, including burying you, your family, etc. So on.
Bottom line, I'd be slow to judge other people as stupid because any given person can have a very limited amount on information about what is and what isn't, no matter how much time did we have to think about it.
And regarding the mindless panic, we see pretty clear what happens in the countries where people were "courageous" and hot witted. Check New York, Italy, Spain, the British PM whom is the best example of punished ignorance.
Medically speaking, when you have a virus that expands so quickly and kills so many people in such a short period of time, the smart decision is to take precaution measures. People tend to forget that in December it was present officially only in China, and in a couple of months it reached all the world.