Assume ebola becomes more contagious and grows exponentially in the US, how does western society respond? I’ve only seen movies in that scenario but the response from movies is martial law, shutting down transportation, mandatory quarantine, etc. How accurate is that?
Very big IF, brother.
I would think that it would be treated as was pre-antibiotic era scarlet fever, and polio until the mid-1950s. Quarantines and contact tracing, closure of public gathering places such as malls, theatres, taverns, and schools. Perhaps restaurants would have to serve roles similar to canteens or delivery services. Cancellation of sporting matches, or possibly games played in the absence of spectators. I would hope that air travel would be reduced to the level absolutely necessary, i.e., ferrying essential personnel and things like parts and medical supplies.
It would make a huge difference where the outbreak broke out. It’s easier to cordon off Grand Forks, ND than New York City.
I’m glad I can work at home if needed. I would think a lot of people would do that if possible.
Yup, this would be a wonderful time to teach online for a few weeks. Plus eat all the pasta we seem to accumulate.
We seem to be getting panicky about Ebola, but the common Flu killed over 300 people per year in 2012/13 and 2013/14, in Canada alone.
Worldwide over 250,000 die annually.
Get your flu shot.
This thread isn’t really about ebola, I am wondering what happens if a highly contagious disease with a high fatality rate starts to spread in a wealthy country.
What do we do if a disease pops up with a 50% mortality rate and a R0 of 10. Shut down the airports, bus terminals, stadiums, shopping malls, etc and declare martial law?
What does R0 mean? (A guess: Each infected person passes it on to 10 others on the average?)
I think we should all get 3-D printers, right away. Then we could stay at home and get all our food and other necessities e-mailed to us.
No outbreak is going to occur simultaneously everywhere at once across the entire United States. The CDC would quarantine first entire districts or single airports where the disease was spreading.
Unless you are talking about a hypothetical diseases with a very long incubation (like HIV) , it will always be possible to geographically isolate an outbreak.
But are there protocols in place for this? I know there are (over here at least, I guess most western countries are similar) to shut down everything that’s not essential in case of pandemic, but I’m not sure there’s anything planned for quarantining, say, a city or region and prevent people from moving from one place to another.
Legally the CDC has the power to order quarantine and isolation orders, I see no reason they couldn’t issue them to entire cities. The police and national guard can be called on to enforce those orders.
See here:
http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantineisolation.html
As far the actual protocols in when that would happen, I wouldn’t expect they would make those public.
There probably is not anything in place right now, but in the past there have been. Smallpox was a nasty disease that required quarantine of entire cities, and it was done as recently as 1972 in Kosovo (that was the last major outbreak in Europe). Quarantine and mass vaccination stopped the disease from spreading further.
Of course, we don’t have an Ebola vaccine (yet). We’d have to rely on strict quarantine. It has been done, it could be done again. For sure, the people affected won’t like it but it does work when done properly.
Hopefully those hypothetical protocols work better than the real ones do currently against the real ebola. How is it possible that at least three nurses got infected recently in Spain and the US?
At least with ebola it’s over pretty quickly. If there haven’t been any new cases in a month or so you can lift quarantine. No such luck with the flu. With that, you’re going to be exposed sooner or later.
The nurse in Spain has identified the probable moment when she was infected, touching her face as she removed the PPE. This would indeed indicate that a change in protocol would help…if it’s a protocol that allows face touching, it’s not going to be effective. Might be better to add an additional person to remove the stuff while the nurse stands perfectly still with her arms out to her side, or something.
Read this morning that the Dallas hospital didn’t have properly fitting gear, and they were using medical tape to cover exposed skin at the neck. That’s certainly NOT part of the protocol, and needs to not happen. Anyone who may be called upon to treat Ebola patients should have the actual gear, sized and tested and available for training and practice now. Right now, well before there are more victims to treat. I’m sure there are logistical hurdles to that, as there are only so many suits in existence and it takes time to make and ship new ones. Until that happens, we need to transfer and treat patients only at those hospitals that have had real training, not photocopies handed out at an “inservice” between shift change and 9am meds.
I think the biggest change likely for laypeople is that the voluntary quarantine may become a mandatory one, and that it may need to be enforced in some manner. I don’t know whether this will look like having a police presence outside the home to make sure you’re not leaving, or if it would be better to build quarantine facilities where you get a mandatory 3 week vacation. Both are expensive solutions. But, as Nancy Snyderman and her crew so nicely demonstrated, people cannot be trusted to maintain a voluntary quarantine. While it’s true that she’s well equipped (as a doctor) to make sure no one in that car had any symptoms, and were therefore not contagious, it definitely showed how ineffective the “voluntary quarantine” is.
In the past, while sometimes a mandatory quarantine involved putting people in a secured location it was also successfully done in peoples’ homes. The main thing is watching to make sure they don’t break protocol AND making sure there is a way to get needed supplies in and trash/waste out.
If the quarantined areas are small enough all of this shouldn’t be a problem: stay inside your house for three weeks, food and other stuff will be delivered to your doorstep and police/army is on guard to make sure everyone complies. The hardest part is probably collecting the trash.
Of course this wouldn’t work for all of Manhattan. You could easily cordon off Manhattan, but that doesn’t help because people within the quarantine zone will keep infecting each other and the disease won’t go away.
But if tests are reliable and fast enough, not much quarantine would be necessary.
Incinerators at quarantine sites could easily be implemented by using metal drums with wire grates on top. Panic shopping and small towns attempting to isolate themselves could mushroom into a real problem. People not reporting to work is another real potential problem.
Valid points.
For panic shopping, that would have to be implemented at the retail level, between local officials and management. I remember there being rationing of staple goods during major strikes in the 1960s when a Teamster or UFCW strike could wreak havoc.
People not reporting to work: I can see it happening in hospitals. If you’re a minimum wage custodian, would you go in if you had tiny children at home? Otherwise, how many people are that important, seriously? We had a plan at my last job which came down to, how few people can we survive with? And it came down to that during a flu epidemic when almost no one got inoculated. I can also see people that depend on mass transit calling out rather than be encapsulated in a subway or bus.
For the sake of argument, let’s say I own a hardware store. So, I slap on a mask, and open up on Saturdays by myself, and don’t open at all during the week. Inconvenient? Yes. Bad economically? Yes. There are so many unessential jobs in an emergency, it’s not even funny. You need workers to keep pharmacies and groceries open. You need police and firefighters. You need people to keep the water and sewage flowing. You need trash collectors, but your idea of burn barrels might be a revolting solution. Banks don’t need to stay open when there’s no place to spend money; gas stations, either. Schools and libraries can close for a couple of weeks. Most retail can close, too.
The media have blown this all out of proportion.
Assuming a pandemic, I doubt it’s doable to keep a police officer at the door of every suspected case (and should he bring groceries, too? People need to eat, quarantined or not). I doubt forcefully removing said people from their home would be doable, either. It can only work if there’s a very limited number of cases, IMHO. Past this point, I can only see quarantining the whole area/city. Assuming that this is doable and can be carried on efficiently, which, again, I doubt.
Cashiers in supermarkets and such. I’ve seen how to keep them working and how to protect them are part of contingency plans. People working in utilities companies. People collecting trash. Truck drivers bringing food into cities. A ton of low-level workers are that important. Convincing them they should keep working for their paltry salaries and be in contact with the public (or even coworkers) when everybody else is hiding at home might be a challenge.
We have also a contingency plan at my workplace that would result in almost nobody coming to work in a worst case scenario, but only a very small part of our activity is vital, indeed. At least in the short term. In the long term, a solution would have to be found. We couldn’t completely stop operating for months on end without causing havock at a national scale. So I guess this might be a problem too. : it can’t last for months. At some point almost everybody will have to resume a “normal” life, despite the pandemic.