In attempts to reverse the spread and prepare the curative care sector, and under huge uncertainties, many governments have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak with either voluntary or mandatory physical isolation and distancing measures. These have put state-society relationships in any political system under great pressure. In addition, many countries have shifted public decision-making authority from the democratic institutions to temporarily concentrated executive arrangements. With specialist expertise involvement, these arrangements enabled quick and invasive regulatory response. To the extent evidence is available, such technocratic crisis administration offers policy rationality. Yet, it also tends to postpone or disregard public value assessments. It thereby increases a perceived contradiction between ‘health’ and ‘the economy’ while in fact the two are mutually reinforcing values. As a result, such shifts in decision-making authorities have consequences for public trust. News about unintended socioeconomic consequences affects the ‘output legitimacy’ of the COVID-19 policies and regulations. Moreover, minority needs and impacts are easily overlooked as democratic policy deliberation (a policy’s ‘input legitimacy’) is temporarily postponed or even shut down altogether. For instance, in an open letter ‘A call to defend democracy’, published 25th of June in international and national news media, 500 political and civil leaders, Nobel laureates and pro-democracy institutions from around the world observe that, besides the unsurprising repression of critics by authoritarian regimes, ‘even some democratically elected governments are fighting the pandemic by amassing emergency powers that restrict human rights and enhance state surveillance without regard to legal constraints, parliamentary oversight or timeframes for the restoration of constitutional order.’