People are eager to give the government power when they're scared. You can feel the panic in the HN threads -- at the end of the day, most people are herding animals. A free society can't effectively force a quarantine, outside of the voluntary recommendations already being provided for social distancing. That seems like a trade-off many would find reasonable if the plague wasn't currently on their minds (2% chance of dying in a plague every century in exchange for having civil liberties the rest of the time).

What a free society could do is massively incentivize and subsidize new drug research, while lowering the barrier to entry for human trials. Right now this is only being done manually in the US with a few drugs and major players, such as Remdesivir, instead of allowing a systematic approach for non-major players to skip the line, too (e.g. university research labs).