I mean, the quick shift makes sense with vaccine deployments and the medical community figuring out how to deal with it all happening within a few months. We went from not being equipped to deal with the disease to being equipped in a pretty short window.

If governments were using covid as an excuse to control their population, then I would have expected them to hang on to the rules for as long as possible. Instead, we saw rules change as the context changed. That's generally not what totalitarian takeovers look like