I think so.
I've been anticipating the encroachment ever since I was "red-pilled", so to speak. That must have been around 2003, though going through public schooling left me with the eternal suspicion that the narrative is full of lies.
So why should anyone be optimistic? The first reason would be appearances: Those with the greatest influence over how the "pandemic" appears are those whom we know are hoping / guiding an outcome to their benefit. Thus no matter how lopsided it might seem, we know aspects of it have to be exaggerated.
The next reason would be that indeed our respective constitutions, and human rights as a whole, have been violated with "emergency measures", they will still need to either a) adopt some of the measures as permanent law or b) create a world-wide crisis which necessarily destroys huge swathes of the populace.
It will be difficult to make those legal changes without a more dramatic crisis, and though that could happen, it wouldn't happen everywhere, or simultaneously. I think that so long as a few places refuse to go through with it the 2nd time around, it will be enough to keep the world from falling into eternal despair.
The next reason is that more experts are becoming red-pilled. For example, I follow some woke epidemiologists on twitter who have been on board with everything, but even they're starting to be accused of inducing "vaccine hesitancy". I don't think they're losing in their respective public health organizations (CDC/FDA in US, Health Canada/PHAC in Canada). There are a lot of these, who refuse to go along with the idea that natural immunity should be disregarded.
Lastly, it's about productive potential. Yes, the globalists can use bands of goons to control small to medium sized protests, and they have all of big tech in their back pocket, but at some point people need to actually innovate physical solutions. Working on engineering teams, I've really been able to see that it's true how the square root of a given workgroup accounts for 50% of the productive output. There's a lot of hubris necessary to assume that a complete transformation of society via the 4th industrial revolution is going to be successfully executed through dominating humans by force and constraining viable career choices to those which serve the effort. Sure, much can be done, but I think that most of our human advancement, regardless of the need for collective efforts, wouldn't have been possible without free thought and creative brilliance. People need room to let their poor ideas evolve into more useful ones. I think that the engineering requirements for each portion of the "revolution" will hit sticking points.
So the question is, how far do things go before a significant enough portion of control mechanisms are relinquished from the clutches of the privileged few? How much damage will be done in that time?
If we're counting on a deadly disease, then which form does it take?
I'm kind of thinking out loud, here, so what do you think? Do you think they can, for example, change the narrative to being one about climate change, and make measures permanent, without having to release a new threat?