Can you make that not sound condescending? That tone doesn't help.
Mate, that tone isn't condescension, it's extremely intense frustration. There's a lot of people going around spreading horseshit right now about how what we need to do to properly manage a fucking plague is somehow bloody unknowable, when it's
not. At all. The
right course of action is friggin'
solved on the top level of things (test hard, limit movement and means of spread, support your population), it's just logistics and people refusing to
do it that's the actual trouble.
That said, while I think that is possibly a solution, it doesn't address "balance" (people want to go to work because their bored, not merely because they aren't paid).
It absolutely address balance. People get to go to work to alleviate boredom, without getting people killed, when the situation is such
they can go to work without it getting people killed. Which means identification of infected individuals and control of their movement, management of protective equipment, adapting new behavior to prevent spread, and so on.
It's also not practical at all. I mean are you really suggesting that we forcibly incarcerate people for quarantine?
Mandated quarantines have already happened in the US -- there were stories earlier this year of poor bastards getting held in the hospital for days/weeks and then getting the bill for it shoved up their ass. Some other nations, some of them even democracies, also seem to be managing something vaguely in that direction.
And absolutely, if you're confirmed positive you should be locked down pretty hard, and probably have the law bust your ass with something (fines, incarceration, whatever) if you don't comply and go screwing around trying to infect people with something that kills somewhere between one in a hundred to one in fucking
ten of the people that catch it.
Every effort should
also be made to make sure it doesn't screw you over one way or another (from going stir crazy to going bankrupt), and probably to reward willing compliance if that'd help, but if you want your balance point between economic activity and people not fucking dying to the goddamn plague you
have to limit the movement of the infected.
Ideally without coercion, but if basic goddamn sense and decency doesn't stop someone from spreading a plague you go to your next options.