You've not had a vaccine mandate?I hadn't noted the government "telling me what to do"
I was living in Toronto in 2003 and working on Bay Street during the SARS outbreak. The entire city shut down because an unknown disease was making us sick. The government didn't do this, the people did, because it was how you respond to infectious disease. SARSTOCK - the big Rolling Stones Concert in Toronto that summer was the first big event in the city all year. Performers, tourists, everybody was afraid to come. And we weren't going out.
When corona virus hit, my first thought was to stay home, and keep safe, just like SARS. That the government mandated lockdowns was neither here nor there. Masks and lockdowns where what were doing in 2003, because that's smart behaviour in a pandemic.