Paternalism and covid-19 hysteria

I was having a conversation trying to explain to someone that there isn't just one possible reasonable way to approach the coronavirus pandemic. It's rather like climate change, in that things are actually very complicated, and to pretend otherwise is unreasonable and often outright hysterical (usually not in the sense of being extremely funny). I think it could help a lot of people to understand this if they would watch this Jordan Peterson video: What Greta Thunberg does not understand about climate change | Jordan Peterson - YouTube. While watching, consider what kinds of similar things we might need to say in a hypothetical video entitled: "What covid-19 alarmists don't understand about pandemic public policy."

So in the conversation I was having, my interlocutor says: 

"ok then explain your libertarian approach. The only reason I didn’t accept your answer is because 'libertarian approach' means nothing to me. I can assume that it means that you don’t want to do anything about the spread of the virus. Keep the elderly and immunocompromised isolated. Let the healthy infect themselves and pray for some form of immunity. Correct me if I’m wrong."

He was wrong, so naturally I corrected him. Here's what I said:

"I actually don't think it is necessary to isolate the elderly and immunocompromised either. I think it's okay to risk dying (that's life, bro), and it's unreasonable for the elderly to become obsessed with not dying of covid, just as its unreasonable for anyone to become obsessed with not dying in general. There are always limits, but I think the default position should be to inform people as effectively as possible about 'the science,' such as it is, and let them decide how they want to handle that information. If you want some well-established 'science,' here's a bit to consider: if covid doesn't kill the elderly and immunocompromised, something else will. Haters gonna hate, and old people gonna die -- that's science, man, and that's why people are often afraid of getting old, but it can't be changed. So to be clear, if an old person wants to be isolated, go for it; but condemning an innocent old person to involuntary solitary confinement because you think it's for their own good is actually just wrong."

So what I'm talking about here is what is usually referred to as the issue of paternalism and it's one of the most basic issues in health care ethics (a.k.a. bioethics). And it's really important! Usually forced solitary confinement is considered to be cruel and unusual punishment! But I think the really interesting thing is that it apparently never even occurs to many people as a problem to be reckoned with, including many people who imagine that they're "just following what science says" or some such simplistic nostrum.

Here's a little rant from a real scientist, which is naïve in a number of important ways, but makes the point effectively enough about the rather stupid idea of "just follow the science": Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Follow the Science? Nonsense, I say.