Few people realize that in just about any country, the health department can overnight become the most authoritarian government agency there is. Essentially doctors directing men with guns, all the way up to the use of nuclear weapons to stop a major biological disaster.
The health department can disallow all constitutional rights, and there is no civil appeal. And this is not a new regime, but has existed for 100+ years. Before World War II and the invention of antibiotics, or even the widespread use of sulfa drugs, invented in 1932, quarantines were common and everyone learned to respect posted quarantine signs.
And yet, at the same time, politicians who would seek to increase their power during a medical crisis are in for a rude awakening. They are no longer in charge of things, nor are bureaucrats. It is a dictatorship of doctors.
And I think I can pretty well say that if medical doctors are in charge, it will be pretty hard to tell if they are American, Canadian or Mexican, because their concerns will be almost identical, and the execution will almost certainly be similar, and brutally objective.
Ironically, being under a technocratic regime of medical doctors is probably not too bad, specifically because they don’t *want* to be in charge, they *have* to be. And they want to return power to the civil authorities as soon as possible. This is not a bad quality to have in leaders.
And while initially, a large percentage of the population will stupidly and stubbornly resist their direction, they either become more cooperative, or they have a much better chance of becoming casualties.
But most epidemics like avian flu are like wildfires. Which means that they will pass through an area quickly. Strangely, though, in two waves. And between waves, and once it has done its worst, locally at least, things will quickly return to some degree of normalcy. The biggest after effect being that people remain standoffish and concerned with hygiene for some time. But otherwise, life will return to a great extent, to normal.
That depends whether the real objective of the leadership is to mitigate a plague, or to enhance their own power.