Will this actually be worth it?

The price of avoiding a disease may or may not be worth the benefit of doing so. As with this idea about airlines:

Air passengers could face four-hour waits to board planes, inflated ticket prices and a dramatically reduced schedule in the future, analysts have said.

The increased ticket prices would be because of this strange - given that everyone will be breathing the same recycled air - idea that the middle seat of any row might not be used. Even, some insisting that load factors should only be 20% or so of all seats.

As to the 4 hour waits, there are some 120 million passenger movements concerning UK people each year, about a billion for Europeans as a whole. Current realistic timings are about 90 minutes - so, that’s 2.30 extra for each of those passengers.

Time has a value, the most obvious value to apply being minimum wage. Which, we’re told often enough, is going to be perhaps £10 an hour soon enough. So, ASI calculator (back of fag packet, 1, pencil, 1). That’s £3 billion a year just from this one, single, measure to avoid a further irruption of Covid-19. Or, given that it only works if everyone does it, £25 billion odd a year for Europe.

And this will save how many lives?

This being before we get to the real costs, that people rather like flying off on their hols which is why they do so. An enjoyment which is to be denied them.

We do not say that this specific cost is such as to mean we should all revert entirely to normal and damn the disease. Nor even to say that this would be the straw that breaks that camel’s back. It is though to say that whatever methods are used to try to curtail any future spread are going to have costs like the above. Those costs being cumulative, each restriction adding to the expense of the one before.

At some point we do have to ask - how poor do we want to be? Our own answer being, as yet, no more than a sneaking suspicion that the answer is richer than the planners currently musing on those restrictions are likely to allow us to be.