The UK has recently gone into a lockdown, which is in all likelihood not an ideally efficient policy. Here efficient means that a policy's net-benefit has been optimised, i.e. any other distribution of costs and benefits would, on the whole, be worse. Yet, the lockdown is probably one of the best realistically-implementable policies we currently have.
First, what does the lockdown solve? Without a lockdown, a significant number of people impose negative costs on others for which they are not themselves liable (in other words, they impose negative externalities). For example, the cost of getting sick for 30-year-olds is lower than the cost of getting sick for 60-year-olds. Yet, if the former group gets sick, they increase the probability of infecting the latter group too, so 30-year-olds inflict high costs on 60-year-olds. The lockdown solves this problem by preventing everyone from infecting each other. On the other hand, this means that people who impose low negative-externalities are prevented from doing high-value work, resulting in lower productivity. To keep the loss of productivity to a minimum and simultaneously solve the externality problem, one could use tort law. A tort is a civil wrong for which one is legally liable: when one commits a tortious act, one is liable for the damages caused. In this case, tort law could deter people from spreading the disease by making people legallyliable for causing disease-related damages, e.g. if it can be established that you infected 30 people who otherwise would not have been infected, then you are legally obliged to pay for their medical expenditure. However, such a policy is probably unenforceable because it is too costly to find out how many infections someone caused and what the associated damages are, which is why the lockdown is currently a good alternative.
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