A public health / pandemic expert should know that "quarantining" 3000 people on a cruise ship only gets you from 10 cases to 3000 cases.

It's a leaky, filthy sieve with 3000 bodies and no isolated airflow.

For exercising authority (especially government authority) incompetently? Absolutely.

Negligent homicide is a thing.

Maliciousness is not an inherent element of a crime. For example, many people believe themselves perfectly safe drunk drivers when they drive home, but their incompetence combined with taking actions that put others at risk result in penalties.

If you do not punish incompetence when lives are on the line, then you should expect more deaths due to incompetence. We send people to prison for far less than this.

> If you do not punish incompetence when lives are on the line, then you should expect more deaths due to incompetence. We send people to prison for far less than this.

The difference here (vs drunk driving) is the situation that led to this particular kind of incompetence is unlikely to be repeated. The situation also involved significant unknowns and gaps in basic understanding of the danger.

IMHO, it would be wrong to put anyone in jail for the handling of the cruise ship quarantine. That would be unnecessarily punitive. Might as well just kill a literal scapegoat. This seems like more a situation for a fault-free retrospective aimed at improving procedures and training for future epidemics.

Cruise ships are notorious for norovirus transmission. They are not built for a quarantine. Whomever made the decision should be stripped of their credentials along with jail time, which is what the passengers had to go through as is, in order to make an example of what should happen to anyone in authority making such an ignorant, if not publicly malicious, decision in the future.