This type of thinking is why we are heading in a direction of authoritarianism everywhere.

And COVID was not "totalitarian enough"? Yet people were forbidden from leaving their homes for a time.

It was really amazing what fear could do to a population, how it rallied mostly together.

Seems to vary greatly by region, of course. Where I live, we barely had anything you could call a lockdown, but they got really insistent about vax passports for restaurants etc.

Sometimes I think about that: vax aside, they actually managed to provision trusted certificates for a huge percentage of the population in a short period of time. Could have actually been useful for online ID, though we know of the dangers there; but look, here I am signing into my government's website using my bank as a 3rd party IDP. Shouldn't I sign into the bank using the gov't instead??