Quarantine Occurrences

[maike]

So, the H1N1 craze drives on.

I'm set to leave for Shanghai two weeks from tomorrow and then on to Beijing after a week there. I'm very nervous about getting quarantined. Something as arbitrary as showing up a little hot on an IR scanner is all it takes to land me in house arrest for a week. Or worse yet, sitting next to/near someone who showed up hot.

What I'm curious is, anybody have an idea about how frequent these quarantines actually occur? I'm pretty nervous.

[Mouseneb]

Good luck with that. I have no idea on percentages, but I expect the number of people in quarantine to spike in the fall when all the foreign English teachers arrive back in the country to begin teaching the fall semester!

[jbradfor]

What I'm curious about is whether any of the people who were quarantined eventually contracted swine flu, that is, whether the quarantine did any good at all.

[Mouseneb]

The quarantine is not meant to stop the people being quarantined from catching swine flu. The reason they are quarantined is because of suspicious that they already have swine flu. The purpose of quarantining them is to stop them from spreading the flu around the community.

[Xiwang]

What I'm curious about is whether any of the people who were quarantined eventually contracted swine flu, that is, whether the quarantine did any good at all.

UK students last week were put into quarantine because one of them had swine flu. That flu then appeared in others within the quarantined group:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/8159047.stm

It was reported elsewhere on BBC that each student was given a private room at the quarantine hotel.

[maike]

Well I'm headed to China a little bit in front of the Fall rush, so I think that I can avoid a spike in protectionary measures. I guess I'll just have to try to stay healthy.

My Taiwanese friend and I (who are travelling together) were discussing whether or not we should wear a mask on the plane. I'm kind of undecided. On the one hand you're displaying cautionary measures and the Chinese inspections personnel may see that. Or, they see that I'm wearing a mask and therefor must already be sick and so they quarantine me anyways!

[Mouseneb]

The mask will protect others if you are sick, because when you first breathe them out particles are large enough to be mostly stopped by the mask. Later, as they spread through the air, particles break up and become very fine, and can pass through the mask. Wearing one will not protect you from catching the flu unless it is airtight, or very nearly so.

[chinahandinfo]

I have several friends who recently arrived in China from various countries. Some of the Chinese language schools they are going to be studying with told them that they'll need to be quarantined in private apartments for seven days before they can commence classes on the school premises. The strange thing is that they're free to come and go from the apartment as they wish, potentially infecting millions of people! Not to mention the journey on trains, buses etc they have made to get to the city where their schools are based in the first place. Seems like a strange ''quarantine'' to me.

[maike]

I suppose you're right about the masks.

Chinahand, that doesn't sound too bad to me! I'll play "Let's Pretend" if they want me to.

[jbradfor]

@xiwang, thanks for the link. However, from my reading of it no one else in the group, as of yet, has contracted swine flu. The article is very confusing, because it states "Nine British pupils have now been diagnosed with swine flu in Beijing", but from my reading of that none of those nine were in the same group.

@Mouseneb:

The quarantine is not meant to stop the people being quarantined from catching swine flu. The reason they are quarantined is because of suspicious that they already have swine flu. The purpose of quarantining them is to stop them from spreading the flu around the community.

Duh.

That was what I was asking, did anyone that was quarantined because they were with someone that had swine flu eventually contract it. In other words, did the quarantine work? Did it actually stop anyone from spreading it?

[Mouseneb]

I think the reason I misunderstood your intent was the phrase "eventually contracted swine flu." To me this means they didn't have the flu when they were quarantined, but caught it while in quarantine. Hopefully that isn't happening. Of course the flu has an incubation period where you could have already contracted the flu, but aren't showing symptoms yet. I think it is quite probable that many asymptomatic people have later developed symptoms of swine flu while in quarantine. Unfortunately I don't have any data on that, sorry! Maybe someone else does. In the meanwhile, here's a useful site for getting more info about swine flu:

http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/

[jbradfor]

I think the reason I misunderstood your intent was the phrase "eventually contracted swine flu." To me this means they didn't have the flu when they were quarantined, but caught it while in quarantine.

Good point. "did, in fact, have swine flu" would have been better phrasing than "eventually contracted swine flu" in my post.