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The Great Barrington Declaration is a thing for a reason. Some people will only accept that their 'better safe than sorry' medical tyranny is the only way forward. Thousands of qualified academics and professionals with years of experience and accomplished careers say there is something wrong with our draconian expansion, yet people are too comfortable with conceding every right for the chance of saving someone that may have already been on death's door. You have a paradigm of testing that yields many false positives, building communal fear as cases tick higher. A major proponent of PCR tests, Dr. Fauci, having been publicly chastised by the inventor of the PCR test and noble laureate Kary Mullis.

Mullis chastised Fauci for his absurd medical conclusions. Fauci believes that finding markers or material in a person says something substantial about whether they were sick or functionally capable of cultivating the illness or transmitting it. Mullis, as the inventor of the PCR test, thought that was a crock of shit. This criticism was mounted before covid was a thing.

Yet you have Canadian public health personnel taking cues from fearmongering hucksters that will purposefully lie to the public (Mullis said Fauci was perfectly willing to lie to people's faces). Fauci later did go on to lie to people's faces on multiple occasions. It doesn't help that the most vocal objectors are essentially members of another authoritarian political movement (the QAnon and MAGA folks).

Even the Great Barrington Declaration folks are for a limited authoritarian response. They want their authoritarianism aimed at and surrounding vulnerable populations. And political territory you give up, as OP stated, will be hard to gain back in the aftermath. Increasingly arguments to curb the pandemic lean closer and closer to a hypothetical perfect response. The perfect response, of course, is the Chinese government model. Complete with censorship of dissenting or opposing views to avoid unnecessary distractions, people being forced to stay at home, steep fines or sanctions for rule-breaking, people urged to give info about their non-conforming neighbors, etc.

I wonder what the next step after curfew is. A rewards program for keeping an eye on your neighbors? Or maybe sanctions for not reporting anything you see. After all, by any means necessary.

If nothing else, the pandemic shows just how far anarchism needs to go to penetrate the public consciousness. At the very least, it needs to articulate in no uncertain terms that there are broad philosophical reasons for why we should not give up certain freedoms. At the very least, people should acknowledge that the society they've decided to go after is not conducive to anarchism and starts to get quite comfortable with soft authoritarianism. To venture any further into that authoritarianism, all you'll need is a few more 'good reasons' or political justifications to tighten the screws.

The threat of a virus that mostly kills people at the end of the average lifespan of a human, with some exceptions and anecdotes, does not seem valid reason to give up that political territory. Even if you quantify and articulate all the many reasons why it's actually worse than that, it pales in comparison to the vast amount of death we were okay (enough to let it be) with at the hands of all other causes of death in previous years. We didn't stop the world over war, or air pollution, or deaths associated with alcohol, or cigarettes, or all types of radiation.

We've got tunnel vision. Not only is our only concern the immediate threat of this pandemic, but we also have little to no regard for any of the social or possible lasting ramifications for what we're doing.