Ineffectual US coronavirus-management plan?

© 2020 Peter Free

 

08 February 2020

 

 

In an allegedly free society, you do what you can

 

Y'all have probably read how the US military is assisting in providing military bases — so as to quarantine people returning from China, who may have been exposed to Wuhan's coronavirus.

 

That arguably makes some sense. Provided that you get past the reasonable idea that it would have made more epidemiological sense to leave those citizens in China, rather than handily transferring the virus (that some of them were sure to be carrying) back to the United States.

 

We might have chosen (instead) to exhibit logic like our Government's (always shouted) rationale that fighting alleged harmfulness "over there" is better than letting it come here.

 

 

And it gets worse

 

Breaking military base quarantine — to send people to outlying local hospitals, when they prove to have fallen sick — defeats most of the purpose to the initial quarantine.

 

Yet, that is exactly what the American plan seems to be.

 

The Sacramento Bee yesterday reported that:

 

 

Four evacuees flown out of China’s coronavirus hot zone were hospitalized with possible symptoms of the virus after landing at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield early Friday, federal health officials said.

 

They are now isolated at an area hospital, McDonald said.

 

Forty-nine others stayed behind at Travis where they joined nearly 180 other evacuees at Travis’ Westwind Inn, the on-base hotel housing them for a federally imposed 14-day quarantine period.

 

© 2020 Darrell Smith, Four new evacuees from China at Travis show signs of coronavirus and are hospitalized, Sacramento Bee (07 February 2020)

 

 

Think about this in epidemiological terms

 

You elect to quarantine people, who may have been exposed to a virus.

 

That alone means having multiple officials and workers engage with them at probably a minimum of two airports. It is unlikely, across all instances, that all of those assisting people managed to prevent acquiring (and spreading) the virus.

 

Then, you redirect these quarantine-destined travelers to a final location, where they necessarily also come into contact with still more assisting people.

 

And finally, when you discover that some of the quarantined people really are sick with the virus, you take them out of the assigned quarantine.

 

And you send them back into the local environment population that you just finished arguing that they should be removed from.

 

This last transfer (of course) means that the now proven coronavirus patients come into contact more still more "new" people. Those are the ones, who are obviously necessary to facilitate:

 

 

the journey to the local hospital

 

and

 

medical treatment while there.

 

 

An obviously key question arises

 

For containment's sake — why wouldn't the United States have ensured that a hospital on the quarantine-providing military base would treat ill patients?

 

That would reduce breaking quarantine. And it would keep quarantine efficiency confined to a location already accustomed to tight military discipline and security.

 

 

The moral? — This laxness is — probably unavoidably — how epidemics eventually become pandemic

 

Sometimes, we are ineffectual by societal choice.

 

Better hope that Wuhan coronavirus is not especially virulent.