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After all, the law is but a contract between us and ourselves throught a governing body, nothing is fixed, and nothing is entirely objective.Right, and no party has the ability to change that contract unilaterally, crisis or otherwise. You can renegotiate the contract, but the contract as it exists does exist.
Yes, there's an argument that people are in particular need of books now that physical libraries are closed. It's a reasonable argument and well worth suspending the normal rules for, somehow.
But there's also an argument that people are in particular need of being paid for their work now that everything is closed. Any modification by a reasonably-representative governing body would take this into account too and try to avoid actions that put authors in an even more financially precarious position than usual.
Neither side has the moral (or legal) right to make things go entirely the way they want them go to. Publishers don't get the right to say that the doctrine of first sale doesn't apply during a crisis because they need to make money, either.
(One thing we could have done is passed an emergency compulsory/statutory licensing regime for e-books, analogous to the statutory licenses for music, saying that the Archive can give people e-books if they arrange for the rightsholder to be paid a certain small but non-zero royalty for each copy. They could sell the books, they could run a fundraiser, they could work with local libraries who are presumably no longer buying new books quite as much, etc. There's no real mechanical reason that couldn't have been implemented quickly, but it does require some competence from the government. If the underlying problem here is that we don't expect the government to be competent, well... that is a problem, but I'm not sure that saying people can disregard the law at their discretion is the answer.)