Initially when I heard Lord Sumption arguing against lockdown on civil liberty grounds, I felt it was a selfish argument.
However his argument is a powerful one, he is one of the most respected legal minds after all. The risk of exposure to the virus is an individual risk of course, but as others have said should individual choice be paramount during a pandemic emergency?
I do have concerns about erosion of our civil liberties, and 'thin end of the wedge' thinking, but if we follow his argument through, allowing people to make their own choices regardless of consequences, surely health services would be rapidly overwhelmed, supply chains for food and medicines for example be disrupted, and chaos could ensue.
This also doesn't take into account the argument about protecting the most vulnerable in society which I believe a responsible society should. There are repercussions in Sweden I see now, about the number of elderly who have died there, but strangely their society seems to have been functioning almost as normal.