As the U.S. battles to limit the spread of the highly contagious new coronavirus, the number of health care workers ordered to self-quarantine because of potential exposure to an infected patient is rising at an exponential pace. In Vacaville, California, alone, one case — the first documented instance of community transmission in the U.S. — left more than 200 hospital workers under quarantine and unable to work for weeks.
Across California, dozens more health care workers have been ordered home because of possible contagion in response to more than 80 confirmed cases as of Sunday afternoon. In Kirkland, Washington, more than a quarter of the city’s fire department was quarantined after exposure to a handful of infected patients at the Life Care Center nursing home.
...
Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, is among those arguing hospitals need to change course.
“It’s just not sustainable to think that every time a health care worker is exposed they have to be quarantined for 14 days. We’d run out of health care workers,” Nuzzo said. Anyone showing signs of infection should stay home, she added, but providers who may have been exposed but are not symptomatic should not necessarily be excluded from work.
...
Eventually, as a disease becomes widespread, quarantine simply stops being a priority, said Nina Fefferman, a mathematician and epidemiologist at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
“There’s a point where we stop trying to quarantine anyone and we just say, OK, we’re going to have more deaths from the fire department not being able to fight fire than from everyone getting the disease.”
. Could offer the ones tested a cash incentive. But then, the incentive may make the data flawed and not totally random.
