I wouldn't go so far as to say it's the Hegelian Dialectic in action, as getting people on the payroll to specifically collapse the society they live in is notoriously difficult and the intersection of True Believers and the technical staff involved in these matters is almost nonexistent and the gap between the open planning for the COVID responses and this is vastly larger, but them having a whole ream of matters they've prepared to take advantage of would not be surprising in the slightest.
Basically, rather than deliberately getting these things started, they work out what the consequences of such eventualities are as best possible, and then set to work preparing to make use of them. This works out a lot better as an explanation of what's happened, as it covers how the lockdown results are so spotty, and the rapid one-eighty March 2020 from COVID being not much an issue to being The Biggest Problem, because the on-the-ground reporters didn't have pre-emptive on-high directives.