I have not personally experienced a new illness in 2020 nor, in my limited experience, have I seen population level evidence of more than the usual amount of acute respiratory illnesses.

If the media rain down upon people 24/7 news that a new, acute respiratory illnesses is sweeping through your community, and breathless reporters are standing outside hospitals, telling us that it’s completely rammed in the ER (A&E for British readers), that psychological stress alone is sufficient to prompt some people to become unwell, or to interpret symptoms of ordinary illnesses as “the new & terrifying illness”.

Saying that, I’ve watched videos by military intelligence types who described just how little they’d need to do to seed the idea of a (non existent) pandemic, specifically, punctuate poisonings in a limited number of locations. So it’s entirely possible that such localised deliberate poisoning occurred.

I am not convinced that this is required to kickstart a panic. However, that in no way suggests they didn’t do any such thing. If the perpetrators did poison selected locations, it’s important to realise that nothing constrained them from doing different things in different places. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if their attitude was to “never let a good crisis go to waste” and they may have tested out several different methods for inducing illness. I put nothing as beyond them.