I don’t have the comparison but before covid people were doing all kind of stuff on their laptops in university. I remember a guy who watched star trek during a lecture and said “the lecture is being recorded, I can watch it later”. Then he watched that lecture during a lecture that wasn’t recorded.
I’m on lemmy for a while now and this is the most American centric comment I have seen so far. There are authoritarian governments that used the pandemic to do shit but all stopped sooner or later. And many governments, left or right or what ever, overreacted at the start.