People, who claim that it's a hoax usually do not sit back, to the contrary, they are eager to give flesh to this statement. It's an exaggeration in order to shake the field.
The exaggeration is a direct reflection of what is perceived as exaggeration on the opposite bank. These were slogans and headlines like "Killer Virus!" "Millions to die!" " Haunting!"
It's as if one had been sitting comfortably in one's residential street, in the kitchen, having breakfast, and suddenly someone storms the door and shouts: "All are to die!"
You jump up and shout: "Where?" One runs into the street, into the stores, into the hospitals and shouts: "Where, where are they, the dead?"
One is already expecting to see the corpses in the alleys, the stacks of the killed, a plague spreading through the country. But then, when you look around and two weeks have passed, you know: "Oh. That was a false alarm."
And then, when you think about it more deeply, you know that a plague never comes alone. It has nasty siblings like recession, depression, poverty, hunger, neglect, cruelty, despair. People have to drink polluted water, freeze because they cannot heat, and suddenly themselves are the worst enemy. Darkness seizes the souls of those who feel helplessly at the mercy of this tribulation of multiple events, which, through their common occurrence, make life hell. The most disturbing thing right now is, that we act as if this is the case, but isn't...
Hence, common sense, which made the exaggerators even more stunned and answered with a kind of unwilling laughter that this could not possibly be, was mocked by the other, because although the roofs were full of sparrows, all singing the same song, they had nothing to point to in the alleys. For there were no corpses floating there.
It is only too understandable that one feels compelled to use one exaggeration for another exaggeration. Virus or not, that is not what one means by the term "hoax". What is meant is that there can be no such thing as an irrefutable proof of mono-causalities. Causes come with great multiplicity, non linear, and they may even not being taken into account. Because you can't count them all.