[Mariner]

“Quarantine, historically and legally, has been for sick people.”

Technically, ordered isolation is for sick people.

Quarantine is designed in statute and practice to separate the sick from the healthy when you have some reason to suspect some number of them have been exposed to an infectious disease. And those laws allow for confinement in a designated place.

Right or wrong.

[Svartalfiar]

Quarantine is designed in statute and practice to separate the sick from the healthy when you have some reason to suspect some number of them have been exposed to an infectious disease. And those laws allow for confinement in a designated place.

Quarantines have never been used as a blanket ""kill-stop the whole economy and everything everywhere". They were targeted only at certain individuals or small groups: households with known infected/exposed persons, infected individuals, businesses known to have had sick persons, or ships coming from unknown areas, with unknown chance of infection. None of those shut down every single person.