I grant you that "making a mistake" is a third option beside "stupid" and "malicious"...
But it never did in the first place. In judging the case at hand, we have a large bandwidth of possible assessments, with two extremes – one extreme that fears the end of the world, spreads panic and has bought truckloads of toilet paper, and another extreme that doesn't see anything worth noting except that everyone else are fearmongers and panic spreaders. As usual, both extremes are wrong, and, as usual, science and the professionals of the involved fields are the places where the most sensible