To me, its pretty clear which is the way to go. I'd rather have the society shame people than put them in undisclosed location for being stupid. Karen's movement is great!
As demonstrated, folks don’t get that, so we empower the state to compel behavior.
There’s a lot of high minded morality around “freedom” with these matters. The reality is the laws around public health are much less draconian than they once were and predate fascism and its ilk. If you showed up in Philadelphia during the constitutional convention with sailors aboard your ship with smallpox, you’d be quarantined and left to die, and the ship set ablaze.
We as a society have tremendous tolerance for these people (at least in the US), who are less "stupid" and more some combination of "dangerously selfish" and "mentally ill". Many such people still have driver's licenses, and you only really get punished for a DWI when you actually do kill or injure somebody.
So if that is the standard society has, we should apply it to COVID-19 to be consistent. If someone dies of a Covid case that is traceable to your own negligence (e.g. going to work with symptoms and no mask), you should be held liable for manslaughter.
It's not some high moral ground of freedom thumping people. This is what our grandfathers fought for.
While there are indeed obvious ethical issues about the incarceration of people like Mallon, and we should have a much better legal framework which isn't as intrusive to their rights, the fact is that an inability to enforce social distancing for just this one person caused tallyable fatalities.
Like, you don't think that the ice-cream licker should have been tolerated despite obvious stupidity, right?