What would it take for you to think that it’s ok for romantic partners to visit and community house quaranteams to merge?
Ethically, I think this can be fine if strong precautions are taken to avoid infecting non-consenting individuals. (The freedom rhetoric only works if one’s actions don’t impinge on other people’s rights not to be exposed to a deadly illness.) If the only potentially virus-transmitting contacts are with people who follow the same precautions, that’s fine in theory. In practice, it can often be difficult to have justified confidence that other people will stick to the rules.
Example: If you infect a person from another household who starts to allow visits with your household under the assumption that both households are otherwise shut off from the outside world, but then one of the people in the other household also makes an exception for visiting her family, and a person from the family gets infected too and goes to grocery stores without a face mask, then you now started a new chain of transmissions that can kill dozens of people who had absolutely no intention of voluntarily taking on additional risks of being infected.
Risking such negative effects may still be justified as long as the probability of it happening is low enough – after all, there are many tradeoffs and we don’t prohibit cars just because they foreseeably kill a low number of people. That said, I expect governments to be aware of those tradeoffs. Accordingly, the restrictions should already be lowered soon, and unilaterally lowering them even further can lead to too much tightening up of the network connections between people and households, which could result in an unacceptably high transmission rate. (It’s not necessarily just R0 > 1 that’s problematic – depending on number of currently active infections, even an R0 < 1 could result in arguably unacceptably many deaths compared to what it would cost to prevent them.)
Ethically, I think this can be fine if strong precautions are taken to avoid infecting non-consenting individuals. (The freedom rhetoric only works if one’s actions don’t impinge on other people’s rights not to be exposed to a deadly illness.) If the only potentially virus-transmitting contacts are with people who follow the same precautions, that’s fine in theory. In practice, it can often be difficult to have justified confidence that other people will stick to the rules.
Example: If you infect a person from another household who starts to allow visits with your household under the assumption that both households are otherwise shut off from the outside world, but then one of the people in the other household also makes an exception for visiting her family, and a person from the family gets infected too and goes to grocery stores without a face mask, then you now started a new chain of transmissions that can kill dozens of people who had absolutely no intention of voluntarily taking on additional risks of being infected.
Risking such negative effects may still be justified as long as the probability of it happening is low enough – after all, there are many tradeoffs and we don’t prohibit cars just because they foreseeably kill a low number of people. That said, I expect governments to be aware of those tradeoffs. Accordingly, the restrictions should already be lowered soon, and unilaterally lowering them even further can lead to too much tightening up of the network connections between people and households, which could result in an unacceptably high transmission rate. (It’s not necessarily just R0 > 1 that’s problematic – depending on number of currently active infections, even an R0 < 1 could result in arguably unacceptably many deaths compared to what it would cost to prevent them.)