You don't know the state of the debate on one of the most important issues of our time, but you felt the need to weigh in with your conjecture anyway? I'm not sure what exactly you think you are bringing to this conversation. Aristotle was a really smart guy, but he would have saved the world almost two thousand years of being completely wrong about physics if he had bothered to check how things actually worked instead of reasoning about it from first principles and assuming that his best guess was good enough.

Talking about hypothetical pressures that a theoretical government might face is a lot less interesting when we can look outside and see that the exact opposite of your hypothetical is actually taking place. Empirically, the pressure to not bankrupt the government and have to lay off police, firefighters, and teachers, to let people go back to their lives, and to not be seen as job-hating nanny-state bureaucrats is the dominant force in state and local decision-making, only barely being held in check by a sense of civic duty and concern for long-term consequences. And in places where civic duty and long-term planning aren't in vogue, we see that the former has won out entirely. Mayor Breed and Governor Newsom are doing what they do despite the political consequences of shelter-in-place, not because of them.