With over a million confirmed cases and a death toll quickly approaching 100,000, Covid-19 is the worst pandemic in modern history by many orders of magnitude. That governments were unprepared to deal with a global pandemic is at this point obvious. What is worse is that the establishment of effective testing and containment policies at the onset of the outbreak could have mitigated the spread of the virus. Because those in charge failed to bring in any of these strategies, we are now seeing a worrying trend: policies that trample on human rights and civil liberties with no clear benefit to our health or safety.
Broad and undefined emergency powers are already being invoked — in both democracies and dictatorships. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban was granted sweeping new powers to combat the pandemic that are unlimited in scope and effectively turn Hungary’s democracy into a dictatorship. China, Thailand, Egypt, Iran and other countries continue to arrest or expel anyone who criticizes those states’ response to coronavirus.