A year some groups of
people calling themselves governments, or groups with the intent to become governments used to prepare most of the world's population for their more totalitarian form of government. If you look at what followed 1918 (
depression and world war), and think that history can't repeat itself because technology has advanced or a few things have changed on the surface since then, think again. As long as
people don't keep the groups calling themselves a government in check, they have no right to do anything the government hasn't given them permission to do.
2020 wasn't the worst year for a plague in
history, the world has been through worse. If a few groups convince enough
people that 2020 is the worst thing that could happen to them, they have almost total control over the lives of the rest of the popilation for the upcoming years. That defeats the point of calling any
government a democracy, since calling it that is misleading.