Yeah, people will people. Gawd knows we couldn't do anything to stop that. Like you know, write laws to incentivize people to take personal responsibility for personal actions.The public heath approach seems to be that we just assume everyone will make poor choices and deal with the fallout. To be honest, I can't really blame them. You might convince one person to [do social distancing | lose weight | get vaccinated for Lyme] but in the aggregate, people still go to movies during pandemics and they still eat too much and move too little.
That's why we don't have any laws about littering, or arson.
Or maybe we do.
Consider:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/us/c ... tate.html
The lady delivering thermometers and Panda Express to our local case is the wife of a coworker.
There were 16 people who were in contact with the guy who got sick. Our solution? Ask them to text our health department if they started to show symptoms.
One of those 16 decided to fly to the Midwest, instead. The system works!
We don't have a second case, and the guy who got sick is at home, recovering.
That seems like we got lucky. It also seems like a public health plan designed to curb population growth, the hard way.
So we had a highly contagious disease, and 17 people to deal with. I wonder how we COULD have done it better?
Obviously, quarantine doesn't work, but 17 people, only one of whom was sick, doesn't require a quarantine.
If I were to come up with a plan, it would be to allow the CDC to assign a disease as an infectious threat. When a case of that threat comes up, isolate the patient, take the history, and contact the others at risk. That's what we did.
But we need to do more than just ask the others at risk to text, and chase them down when they decide to fly interstate.
We need a legal designation, like "isolated individuals" for these people who are exposed, but not sick.
We should provide PPE, in case they need to go into the world. Explain that even if they don't feel sick, they could be infectious, and this disease is too virulent to take chances with.
And that they could be held liable for damages if someone can trace their exposure back to them, after this briefing. Imagine what it costs to isolate a patient in the hospital. And what a lawyer could do with that liability.
Put them on the no fly list.
We have laws to punish people who break quarantines, but by then it's too late. Modify that law to allow anyone they infect after notification by failing to protect the public health to sue them for damages.
We have FMLA to help employees who get sick. Modify this to cover isolated individuals. That takes care of work.
We have tax records. Replacing their per diem income shouldn't be that controversial or expensive. Covering expenses for lost opportunities (nonrefundable airfare and hotel costs for cancelling travel, etc) seems reasonable.
Individuals would have to deal with isolation from family, or their families go into isolation with them.
We should have their Amazon/USPS/etc deliveries routed through the health department. Then dropped off by the nurse who would be checking up on them daily, anyway; and comes by, geared up. The last thing we want is to expose delivery personel.
The government doesn't seem to have any objections to passing obligations on to industry for less important reasons, requiring delivery services to reroute packages from specific addresses to the county health department doesn't seem impossible to coordinate.
Having a case worker contact employers and schools to relieve the isolated from obligations doesn't seem outside of the normal operating parameters of typical government work.
It wouldn't be 100% effective. People will still be people. But it would be far more effective than "text us when you start running a fever".
People have lives, obligations and responsibilities. If we want them to drop all that for the public good, the least that we the public can do, is foot the bills. It's just 17 people.
Or we can foot the bill for the aftermath.
"But! But, my freedoms!" These people are already screwed. Through no fault of their own, or anyone else, they have been exposed to a contagion. Maybe they get sick, and maybe they don't. Either way, their life is going to change, and not in a good way.
Helping them, helps us. Helping us, should benefit them.
These are all existing limits and restrictions. They could all be modified by a single bill. Funding could be picked up by the federal budget for less than the accounting costs. The CDC already has a fund to deal with pandemic threat. Authorizing them to cover these costs seems efficient.
But that would require money, organization, and planning. You know, the stuff we keep hearing the government does.
But there is no constituency this serves. Nobody gets paid. No corporate interests are catered to, and no politicians get campaign contributions.
So while it seems very doable, I don't think we could do it before a whole lot of people died.