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About 15 years ago I heard the concept of the information-action ratio[1] and it totally changed the way I consumed news. As you note, most things in the news are irrelevant to me in the sense that I can’t take any meaningful action based on them.
I still read some news—and pay for $1/week subscriptions to multiple newspapers, which they have so far let me renew indefinitely if I threaten to cancel every six months—but I spend much less time following national and global news than I used to.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information%E2%80%93action_rat...
So your bar for "authoritarian state" is not wanting people with a highly infectious, airborne disease to vacation on a remote island where every single hospital was overcapacity?
You understand that there were no ICU beds available, emergency services were overwhelmed, nurses and doctors were working perpetual overtime with insufficient resources, etc, right?
"Take a test to show you don't have covid before flying to an island with zero capacity to handle more sick people" seems like an incredibly basic, common-sense measure.
If your answer is that emergency situations warrant such "basic, common-sense" restrictions, then my rebuttal is that a) governments will manufacture as many emergency situations as needed, and b) what is basic and common-sense to one may not be to another and in either case, that ratchet will only go one way; in the direction of authoritarianism.
[0]: This liberty has most recently been under controversy again in the context of states wanting to ban travel to other states for the purposes of obtaining an abortion.