The German equivalent of SAGE planned to create fear and panic quite deliberately in the early stages of this outrage The advice included this report found on the German Ministry of the Interior website :
1. People should be scared by a detailed description of dying from COVID-19 as ‘slow drowning’. Imagining death through excruciating slow suffocation incites the most dread.
2. People should be told that children were a dangerous source of infection because they would unwittingly carry the deadly virus and kill their parents.
3. Warnings about alarming late consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infections were to be scattered. Even though not formally proven to exist, they would frighten people.
The advice from the PR and sociologist-heavy and integrity-light SAGE is not published, but who would bet on anything different?
This overview from Jorg M Dostal gives a very interesting overview of the German scene on this, and while our monkeys differ in detail this helps to build the overall convergent opportunist picture: