You are right. Pre modern states ironically had a much lower degree of control over individual lives than the modern, liberal states have. The french revolution innaugurated the era of mass social control, state-sponsored terror and ideological indoctrination. Liberalism was imposed on europe through massacres and cultural warfare, a process that was ironically very similar to what the bolsheviks did in Russia.

I see the Covid hysteria as just one more step in the globalist "Gleichschaltung", which aims to obliterate remaining cultural resistance to the imposition of an integrated global marketplace. In practice, covidism is a hyper-materialistic cult, anti-religious in nature, and is helping create a totalitarian culture of people policing each other. There is an interesting overlap between SJWism and Covidism, and it is not a coincidence.