You’re a healthcare worker in a certain Dallas hospital, you were planning on going away this weekend. You made your travel arrangements months in advance, including purchasing a plane ticket. Maybe it’s for some special event; your sibling’s wedding in the town of your new sister/brother-in-law’s grandmother becacuse she’s too frail to travel. All of your family members will be there but won’t be in this small town any other time as none of them live anywhere near it. Or your getting together with your old college buddies to run the marathon that goes right past your old dorm. Going a few weeks later is pointless; your friends are back wherever they live. Pedestrians aren’t allowed on some of the roads except for the day they’re closed for the race; there’s no aid stations because it’s not race day; there’s no crowd to cheer you on &/or other runners to keep you going. In short, going any other time doesn’t cut it.
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On Wednesday afternoon Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said he planned to enact a legal control order restricting the travel of health care workers who treated Ebola patient Thomas Duncan by blocking them from using public transportation, including buses and airliners.
The control order would give the county legal authority to restrict the movement of those being monitored for the potentially deadly virus.
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Does the gov’t owe you anything for what you paid for but they’re now preventing you from using?
What if you say “F-it” & buy a bus/train ticket (for cash) instead & decide to go anyway on a different form of public transportation What can happen to you; especially if it later turns out not to be Ebola, but a nasty 24-hour stomach bug? Jail? A fine?
I was actually thinking about this earlier. In my mind, the government wouldn’t owe you anything, but the hospital definitely would. It’s their mistakes that led to your being grounded. If they’d followed proper procedures and isolated Duncan when he first went to the hospital, and if they’d followed the CDC guidelines for working with ebola patients, and had they required mandatory entry/exit training, your risk would be practically nil. If a government entity had told them that what they were doing was acceptable, then I think that entity would be culpable as well. However, to the best of my current understanding the hospital willfully chose not to follow the CDC guidelines and failed to provide adequate personal protective equipment and training. I’m obviously not a lawyer.
In discussions like this, I think we need to make a point of recognizing that we don’t have established rights to financial compensation, but whether we have that right or not is not the point. The point is whether we’re willing to do what is necessary to make a quarantine successful to halt the spread of a disease. Considering that most Americans don’t have the savings to make it through a quarantine without financial ruin, it’s in our own best interests to provide gov’t support to those who’ve been quarantined. Otherwise, we risk people breaking quarantine just so they can earn enough money to avoid eviction.
This is my thinking too. I want people in quarantine to be comfortable and paid for medical leave and kept as happy as possible, so that they are much less likely to break quarantine and spread anything.
I agree that people in quarantine shouldn’t have to deal with financial insecurity due to lost wages and the government should ensure this doesn’t happen. The question though was about recompensation for travel expenses for trips that are no longer possible. Clearly being unable to go to your sister’s wedding won’t result in financial destitution, while three weeks of missed work might. But you’d still be out a substantial amount of money and miss out on the opportunity to participate in the event. It seems to me that you’d be deserving of compensation to recoup the expense, but I don’t think the government should be on the line for it.
For the instant case—workers at Dallas Presbyterian Hospital who had contact with Thomas Duncan—the solution is easy: the hospital keeps them on site, and pays them as if they were on the clock. To borrow a phrase, call it DPH’s idiot tax for how they’ve handled this. For situations like the nurse with Carnival cruise tickets, that should be an ideal situation for a refund/exchange for a later trip.
Now, what if you’re minding your own business, sitting in 12B on the flight from Cleveland to Dallas, and CDC/Dallas County Health Services says you get an involuntary 21 day vacation. Not sure what to do then. I guess if quarantine is to preserve a public good—the right of you and me to walk around and not catch a foreign tropical deadly disease—then the public should pay for the measures to ensure that. Stash the quarantined in the same hospital where the crisis originated? Allow them to work from the hospital as much as possible?
Even though I’m not in healthcare, I always make sure I have at least a week of vacation time banked, and I just let my sick time roll over and build up…
For example, right now I have a week plus (50 hours) of vacation time banked, and 85 hours of sick time available…
A hospital is by definition an exposed situation, and protocols for dealing with “normal” contagious people aren’t much different for dealing with ebola patients.
Most protocols don’t seem quite as involved as those described for ebola patients. For example, even preliminary discussion of quarantines and travel bans is essentially unheard of.
Also, not to over-dramatize, and minimizing statements seen in other threads notwithstanding, the product of contagiousness and lethality (that is, the chances you will die if exposed, in short order, possibly infecting friends and family) is orders of magnitude above most other infectious diseases seen in the hospital.
Travel bans have nothing at all to do with hospital infections protocols.
Second, hospital acquired infections already resulted in about 100,000 deaths a year, before a single ebola case was ever seen here. Many of the diseases found in hospitals are far more contagious than ebola.
So no, the risk of catching something else, even a deadly something, at a hospital is orders of magnitude higher than catching ebola.