It's not made up. My brother and his wife both got it, as did her parents, who both ended up in ICU.
But we haven't had a worldwide pandemic on this scale in any of our lifetimes. There's no one to call on who has lived through it. Even the epidemiologists are completely out of their depth. There are no experts. We know it's not uncommon historically, and had to happen eventually, but at the moment have been caught scrambling and unprepared. Governments and citizens are alike in that respect.
Today's world when it started included international flights and trade on a scale infinitely greater than what existed in all prior pandemics. And this particular virus is very contagious and takes a long time to manifest into symptoms. So what once would have been a small outbreak in one locality managed to spread everywhere within a few months. It doesn't appear to be particularly deadly like the plagues for example, but because it's so contagious and the world is (was) so connected, even tiny percentages of people who contract it requiring serious medical intervention overwhelms the medical systems designed for ordinary circumstances, with severe consequences.
So governments around the world are tasked with protecting their populations and the first thing they notice is almost all cases are imported (except in China). So they shut their borders. Next, we figured out that staying away from each other seems to control the spread, so governments put restrictions on crowds and tell everyone to keep their distance from each other. When too many people flouted those, they went into full on lockdown mode, enforcement of which required a number of measures which in normal times would be considered government overreach. And there is legitimate concern about the willingness of governments to relinquish those powers when it ends.
With the focus so intensely on the short term impacts of the virus and the need for immediate action to mitigate them based on very limited and incomplete information, deep consideration of the long-term implications of the actions taken is impossible. In the weeks and months ahead, that will get a lot more attention.
That's how I view what's happened anyway. I think that course of events has led to results which align at least temporarily with various results you'd see in conspiracy scenarios, and that's led to the promulgation of theories about it being planned by some group for world domination, which seem to crop up in similar fashion every time something takes us by surprise.