A SARS Story [vanity, but first hand info from Taiwan]

first hand report ^ | 4/27/03 | me

[ItisaReligionofPeace]

So what. Someone may think they are healthy, but if they are wrong we will all pay the price. In this case the greater good is more important.

[EternalHope]

..depends on the test. pcr (polymerase chain reaction)should pick it up before significant symptoms. unfortunately, the test isn't fully available yet.

Apparently the test has a very high false negative rate, even when symptoms are present. It seems to work only when a person has been very sick for a while (visibly sick for 10 days at one point, although that may have improved by now).

This is one of the many mysteries of SARS. The disease is not well understood.

[Lake]

>>In this case the greater good is more important.

Right.

[philomath]

But this nurse didn't do a "self-imposed quarantine". She came back and spent time with foreigners that are going to return to their home overseas.

right, if you mean quarantine if infected, probably wrong if you mean quarantine if infectious.

to your former question, the reason she is low risk for transmission of sars is her lack of respiratory symptoms. i agree, we can't be so sure about here infection status, but you notice she went back to quarantine!!
so the only risk in question is of transmisssion, which is very low. if she had stayed "outside" i would expect solitary self-imposed quarantine.

i'm being somewhat devil's advocate here, trying to look from the side of the nurse, not our self interest.

[philomath]

Apparently the test has a very high false negative rate, even when symptoms are present. It seems to work only when a person has been very sick for a while (visibly sick for 10 days at one point, although that may have improved by now).

i wondered about that too. my take is the heterogeneity of the population (some may have sars plus other viral load and some may not be sars at all). once we get a better handle on who we legitimately call sars and can clean up our pcr, we should do better.
it would be bad indeed if the coronavirus were mutating fast enough to preclude a distinctive dna map.
i'm gonna comb mmwr and see if they have any additional info and i'll put it here if available.
some technical difficulties with pcr

[philomath]

a healthy person suspected of being infected can be quarantined against their will.

whether this is good or not depends on who is doing the "suspecting": an independent, informed health-care professional, your local board of health appatchik who owes his/her job to the gubbermint, or even worse, fema???

[Travis McGee]

Nursing in the age of SARS.

[EternalHope]

Your link is broken.

[philomath]

probably not all that's broken, but i digress...


http://grimwade.biochem.unimelb.edu.au/bowtell/molbiol/pcr.htm

[EternalHope]

Thanks for the link.

[gcruse]

We successfully evaded the "quarantine police" for the remainder of our trip

Don't bother coming over for Sunday dinner.
We're going to be...uh...spading the tulip bed that day.

[bvw]

You are in a bad way of using the assume feature of human intercranial tissue. You are assuming that a professor from an Ivy League school is making rash judgements while civic authorities are not. Sorry -- but the call back order and other incidentals indicate PANIC is the mindset, and PANIC is never an authority on anything.

[Prince Charles]

Don't wait another day. Pack up and leave.

[zook]

Hi,
It's not simple for us to come home right now, as much as we'd like to. For one thing, we have no home to go back to right now. Our house is sublet to a Taiwanese scholar and her family until mid-June. We can go back to my parents' for a while, but I won't do this until I'm 100% sure we're symptom free.

There's also the fact that my wife and I feel some obligation to our students here until the semester ends.

All that said, we are packing. We've been here since last August and it's not easy to just slip away.

Regarding those critical of me for "breaking quarantine." First of all, I'm not sure we did. I'm not sure that technically speaking "visitors" to homes of hospital staff were included. Second of all, I have to weigh the risks to my family and myself--what would be the likelihood of us contracting the illness were we to report to that hell hole of a hospital? How would my young daughter be affected by the conditions there (e.g., inadequate food, bedding, no air conditioning, no schooling, etc.) for as long as 30 days?

Yesterday one of the nurses paniced and tried to jump from a 7th floor window. Fortunately people stopped her. But continue to see nurses huddled around windows, posting signs and banners protesting their situation.

[Prince Charles]

I appreciate you and your family's predicament, however, the way things are going, I would expect a "midnight knock on the door" sometime soon. The Asian countries seem to be hellbent on tracking down every suspected "Typhoid Mary". And it seems they are using the hospitals as quarantine (concentration?) camps for those who are suspected of having come into contact with suspected SARS carriers.

All in all it seems you're between a rock and a hard place. Good luck to you.

[Prince Charles]

Grammatical correction to myself: "you and your" should be "your and your."

[RightOnline]

Wow.

[Dec31,1999]

bttt.

[Byron_the_Aussie]

Facinating post. Fingers crossed that things work out for your family, Zook.

[zook]

Thanks! My sister-in-law, today, was the first nurse inside Hoping Hospital to volunteer to take care of SARS patients. She begins tomorrow morning at 9:00. I'm proud of her, I think she's very brave, and I'll say a prayer for her tonight.