4. Forced mass quarantine or any other top down approach to an outbreak
securitizes the response. This may not be successful and could increase the
spread of the disease.
Sick people actively seeking care, testing and public health messages concerning
self-isolation and quarantine of contacts are the ways to end outbreaks. Forced
mass quarantines are a direct barrier to those activities. One cannot slow the
spread of disease if people hide infections out of fear or stigma. When authorities
attempt to enforce a mass quarantine on a large population they will not be 100%
effective. By stigmatizing the infection and symptoms they will teach others to
hide their symptoms and drive key populations underground. This results in less
sharing of information with authorities and medical providers, and the most
desperate and the highest risk populations will seek to break quarantine.
https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=civmilresponse-program-sims-uo-2019
US Naval War College game
Does much of this broad statement apply to the current outbreak?
ReplyDeleteFor example:
- there's no stigma, AFAICT, involved in people in having Covid-19.
- from what I've understood, the stated goal of current lockdowns isn't to be 100% effective, but to buy time to better prepare healthcare systems and spread the impact over a larger period of time
- there is no care for Covid-19 in general, and hence (e.g. in the UK) the authorities are generally encouraging people to *not* seek care (until their symptoms become very serious) because it's worse then pointless (they'll infect other people in the facilities they visit).
- in many countries (again, e.g. the UK) testing is not yet available in sufficient capacity to encourage people to seek tests (again, unless their symptoms are approaching life-threatening), so that solution is not (yet) available.
- from what I've read, across Europe generally, advising self-isolation was attempted but found to be insufficiently effective
I note the text couches all that follows in terms of "may" and "could". I haven't troubled myself to verify if it goes on to describe when these limitations are likely to apply or not.
Note: I'm not particularly making an argument for or against forced mass quarantine as the best, or a good, response to Covid-19. I'm only querying the relevance of the above paragraph, given its various caveats and inapplicable elements.
I personally have not seen any stigma with COVID-19, but I have heard 2nd and 3rd hand reports of Asians in other parts of the country being targeted because they(the Chinese) cause this.
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