“You can’t put a price on Human life!”
Well, it turns out you can. The NHS uses a “Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY)” as a measure of cost versus benefit for interventions - each extra year of normal quality of life is worth £30,000. The DfT have the same measure, but they value it as £60,000. In this instance they are considering the impact of transport disasters.
I’d question how many QALYs the quarantine has actually saved, versus the immense costs to industry (and therefore tax income, etc). I’m pretty sure I can guess which side of the cost / benefit ratio it comes down on.