BRITAIN has veered between general lockdowns and periods when we let Covid-19 generally run free. Boris Johnson saw the choice as being between “lockdown” and his occasional preference for allowing infection to spread, “letting the bodies pile high in their thousands,” because his government ruled out a more traditional way of virus control — quarantining infected people. The free marketeers thought a traditional quarantine would have been too great an interference in society. They thought proper public health measures would interfere with “the economy” and, as a result, messed up both health and the economy. We have a big, expensive apparatus to “test and trace and isolate” with a £22 billion budget. There are huge problems with the privatised testing and tracing contracts, but even if they worked, the whole systems falls down when it comes to isolation. Without self- isolation — which is a version of the basic principle of quarantine — the virus cannot be contained