Apart from the fact that, within the context of the other words of my post, your first sentence is plain not true, I'm not sure I (to paraphrase Babbage badly)

Apart from the fact that, within the context of the other words of my post, your first sentence is plain not true, I'm not sure I (to paraphrase Babbage badly) I understand the level of confusion that is required to come to your conclusion. When combating a large-scale crisis like this, you need well-coordinated action. The very basic thing you can not have is every Dick and Harry making their own decisions and improvising on what is the best course of action, each from their own (limited) knowledge of facts and circumstances. More concretely, you can not have every random call center employee decide for themselves whether or not to follow the explicit instructions they are given. That would devolve into chaos in a matter of hours. So no, nothing that happened here is 'negligent' or 'reckless'. ('harmful to human lives', we'll know in a few months or years, but it's a different matter all together). You need central control, and you suggesting that people should just make up their own course of action (call center employees, no less - the people tasked with the dissemination of the very protocol itself) is so far beyond my frame of understanding that I do not think we can have a meaningful discussion on this. (and you 'recalling reading some paper on epidemiology' and basing your (seemingly very strongly held) opinion on everyone winging it on that, just confirms this view on how to manage large scale hazard events)