Because they can.
The ACLU fought a nurse’s quarantine, because she was only exposed to ebola. They said it was a violation of her rights to force her to spend weeks at home. The settlement was that she’d self-monitor and withdraw if symptomatic.
If it was unfair to limit ONE person who was not outwardly ill, it is unfair to quarantine MILLIONS who are not ill and unlikely to become so.
They don’t want to catch it.
The corruptocrats seek money and power
A lot of office workers I know who live in other boroughs and work in Manhattan Are Not Crying about working from home and rolling right out of bed and to work :)
Between that and free money and the promise of more free money I fear too many in the country will be rooting for it to last longer.
It gives 'em more time to write vanities and blogs.
This will facilitate the more rapid downfall of society.
It's a plot, probably by David Lee Rothschildren.
So they don’t pass their health on to the sick.
Spanish Flu, bro. Look it up.
One problem with this virus is that it’s believed that about 25% of those infected don’t display symptoms (or their symptoms are so mild they’re barely noticed), and think they’re healthy. That’s the reason for the new suggestion that everyone needs to wear a mask. Until there’s an at home test that everyone can use daily, there’s no way to tell who is truly ‘healthy’ and who isn’t.
Not exactly. Thy're insisting that everyone sequester themselves because they can't easily tell who's healthy and who isn't. Asymptomatic people can and have spread the disease.
If, and hopefully when, we can test and clear people your point will be appropriate.
The other problem is since we can't yet identify the carriers, if you, as a healthy person, go out and mingle you're likely to encounter one of them.
Because there are asymptomatic carriers of the virus and so kill the virus off be lessening the number of hosts for the virus? I’m in the early geriatric population, although a healthy one with no comorbidities, and I sure as hell don’t want to contract it from an asymptomatic carrier in the push button self-checkout line.
In fact, those who recover from the virus can wander around with immunity knowing they’ve already had the virus. Watch for when that phase gets going.
The problem is: we largely don’t know who’s “sick”.
People can contract & spread the disease long before symptoms emerge (if at all). Quarantining only the “sick” would require frequent & pervasive testing of pretty much everyone, identifying & isolating asymptomatic carriers; that’s great if you can, but practically we can’t (not enough sufficiently reliable tests available early enough in this mess). The risk was it would very rapidly spread thru society unnoticed, THEN see 1-3% casualties in its wake.
If we did only quarantine the sick, you’re relying on people getting symptomatic enough to get tested, which is long after they’ve spread it to many people close to them.
Why the healthy?
Because unlike certain Asian Countries that did extensive testing and quarantining of the sick and those that came in contract with the sick, most of the Western world has chosen a different approach, the one you describe.
IMHO, I believe that is is because we had neither the Public Health manpower (politically incorrect) nor the number of testing kits available.
Coming from the State of WA, where the first confirm case happened and the first confirmed death, the CDC and FDA fought with Research labs over who was allowed to test whom, how the test were to be reported, and who was going to supply test kits. That delay in this state allowed the virus to spread well into the community. At that point there was little hope in tracking contacts, the numbers overwhelmed available Public Health personnel.
In other more authoritarian countries they quickly put resources into testing and immediately interviewing all who tested positive for who they were in contact with for the past week or two. Then they interviewed those folks to get them to quarantine as well as finding out who they had been in contact with. That took a lot of labor hours, which the various USA local and state Public Health services were not budgeted to provide.
The problem with the historical model has always been that almost everything is contagious BEFORE symptoms. Often times by the time symptoms hit you’re actually less contagious because a lot of symptoms is your body fighting it, so you’re body is killing it and has a handle on it. Functionally we’re not quarantining the healthy, we’re quarantining the “might have it, and spread it, not sure”. As the situation sits right now the only people we absolutely positively know don’t have it are the ones we’ve diagnosed with and got better, unless their body failed to make the antibodies (most of the time you do, but it’s not 100%). Everybody else could be Typhoid Marry.
Those opposing the gov’t issuing “shelter in place” etc orders overlook how many people were going to do exactly that without gov’t directive. I was about 1 week from doing so, just hoping schools would close before I felt compelled to make the move to protect family. LOTS of people were on the cusp of stopping most socioeconomic activity, which would have mass-panicked into broad shutdown anyway. Best if gov’t can sanely coordinate what the herd is about to do in fear.
I agree. The healthy and willing should be allowed to work to keep the engine going. You speak of the healthy being quarantined. It’s also a quarantining of the law-abiding. The lawless are fairly free to carry on as they’ve always done, healthy or not. The economy is being stifled because we’re slavishly following models that are being revised downward. I hope we get rolling again at the end of this month.