A friend was diagnosed having covid thru KU Med. Soon after his results came back he got a letter in the mail ordering him to quarantine or face possible arrest. Granted he was doing this anyways. I believe it came from the county government (Wyandotte county Kansas). Also everyday a county nurse called him up to see how he was doing.
I’ve heard of this and totally understand and support it but never actually seen it.
Has anyone else seen this?
When I had a positive TB test, I was officially notified that I had to quarantine.
Who the heck answers their phone?
“Arrest”? Are you sure that’s what the letter said? 
This is what the Kansas Department of Health and Environment has to say:
65-127. Penalty provision. Any person found guilty of violating any of the provisions of K.S.A. 65-118, 65-119, 65-122, 65-123 and 65-126, and any amendments thereto, or failing to comply with any requirements thereof shall be fined, upon conviction, not less than twenty-five dollars ($25) nor more than one hundred dollars ($100) for each offense.
Cell phone!
Well maybe instead of “arrested” a better word would be “ticketed”.
It’s not a better word, it’s a completely different word that doesn’t mean the same thing.
You mean the portable computer I carry daily? The device I have set to silently send calls from non-contacts to voicemail?
I heard there was a state that would have you drawn and quartered* if you didn’t quarantine! Another one would hang you by the neck until you were dead*!
* Meaning, they would tell you again to quarantine. It’s the same right?
Are you sure about all that? The arrest part sounds odd enough on it’s own. If that was a common thing, it seems like we’d be hearing about it on the news on a regular basis and the right would have been rather, uh, vocal about it.
Also, as far as a nurse calling every day, my understanding has been they only do that for people that have been exposed and either not tested or tested negative. If someone tests positive and during contact tracing says that they were, for example, at your house all afternoon last week, the health dept is going to want you to get tested. If you don’t get tested or test negative, they still want to keep track of any symptoms you develop over the two weeks following the exposure. If you test positive, they don’t need to worry about you unknowingly spreading it (knowingly spreading it, sure, but that’s different).
So, as usual, we need to ask, do you have any evidence beyond ‘my friend told me…’
[quote=“urbanredneck2, post:6, topic:925166, full:true”]
Yeah, most people these days don’t answer their phone if they don’t know the number or aren’t expecting a call.
Back in March I was seeing PSAs on TV and facebook put out by health departments saying that they really, really, need people to answer their phones if they called. Of course, they made this mistake (and seemingly ignored requests) to tell the public the number they’d be calling from. If they had said ‘we’re asking everyone to save this number in your phone and to please answer if we call’ would have been a lot more helpful.
I assume they left messages, but if they simply relied on people returning a missed call, I’m guessing that didn’t work out so well.
I took a voluntary COVID test through the county department of public health and I can tell you that when the public health nurse called with the results she left a voicemail message. (I was anxious when I called back, because I thought perhaps it was bad news. Fortunately the results were negative.)
So, yes, I assume the nurse who calls a quarantined individual daily to check in will leave voicemail messages. And presumably after the first day or two, the person might start to recognize the number and actually answer it if they’re available.
There may not be a central number that they all call from. Even if you customized those PSAs per county, there may still be multiple numbers that a particular county Board of Health may be calling from.
Yeah, putting COVID patients in jail (on purpose) seems like a really bad idea.
That is a technical problem with a simple technical solution, that can be solved by paying money to your telephone provider and/or your contractor.
And yes, in Melbourne.Australia you can be arrested and returned to quarantine. That is, more or less, a normal feature of medical quarantine, but as it happens, in Victoria.Australia COVID quarantine was handled as a political and law and order problem rather than a medical problem: first the responsibility of “Major Events” (who do hotel arrangements for large conventions), then, nobodies responsibility, then after problems, the responsibility of the Justice Department (who do police and courts and jails).
On the mostly correct basis that we have political problem, not a COVID problem, but with a complete disregard for the medical factors, leading to escape from quarantine, and, separately, bad nursing home outbreaks.
@Melbourne is quite right there’s a technological solution to the “what number?” part. But there’s no solution to the social engineering problem that follows immediately:
The day these hypothetical PSAs with the number(s) came out would also be the day the scammers/spammers began using that number as the caller ID for all their criminal calls. “This is the IRS calling and you’re in trouble”. And of course “We’re from the public health department and we need your CC number to pay for your COVID test you need tomorrow.”
Giving the public a supposedly trustworthy phone number that the authorities can’t in fact secure against widespread untrustworthy use is worse than useless.
That’s what I was thinking. Bigger cities can easily set up a covid ‘hotline’ that people can call with questions and all outgoing calls from their ‘covid team’ will (appear to) originate from that number.
Hell, at my little business we have four lines, if you dial out from any of them, it appears to be coming from one specific number (one of the lines). We just did that so people using their caller ID would call into one specific line. When people would call back and get random lines, while not a huge problem, meant call hunting didn’t work.
But I’m in a smaller city, the police/fire/EMT/city hall are all one building and I’d be surprised if they had more than a dozen or so phone numbers between them. It would not have been all that hard to figure something out.
At the very, very least, they could have reminded people about what was going on and asked them to please check their voicemails (if they don’t answer calls) over the next few months instead of assuming they’re spam and deleting them and maybe giving out the local health department phone number for people to independently call back on if they got a call/message and want to verify it’s real (like you do/should do if you get a call about, for example, your credit card being compromised).
In the U.S., the federal government and Centres for Disease Control have the power (Public Health Services Act) to enforce involuntary isolation, and they have done it, too, although normally it is the State’s responsibility:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title42/html/USCODE-2011-title42-chap6A-subchapII-partG-sec264.htm
https://ecfr.io/Title-42/Section-70.2