Interesting question.
- The short answer is: Yes, absolutely.
- The longer answer is: It's complicated, but still: Yes, possibly.
Minimus, I know you know what recently happened in Hungary when—on March 30th, 2020—the Prime Minister, Orbán Viktor, seized absolute power and essentially turned Hungary into a autocratic dictatorship overnight.
Here's a link to a thread I started on that and on which you commented:
Orbán did what tyrants always do, they use any opportunity that arises to grab more power. In this case it was the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here's also an on-topic case that's currently happening here in the United States:
A US appeals court ruled this week that Texas could prevent physicians from performing abortions because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In their ruling, the judges leaned heavily on a 1905 Supreme Court decision against a Massachusetts man who had refused vaccination during a smallpox outbreak (see Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 1905).
Students of history are always wary of situations like this because we know that people in power who are so inclined have often used them as opportunities to seize even more power as they take away individual rights.
I'm not saying that it will happen, only that it has happened many times in the past, and it certainly could happen again, anywhere.
Don't think it can't happen here. It can.