Friday, August 14, 2020

Ebola quarantine criticized (a blast from the past)

Didn't believe me when I said full lockdowns and other extreme measures used to be absent from any pandemic protocols?

In 2014, the world was dealing with the deadly Ebola virus pandemic. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York (a Democrat) and then-Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey (a Republican) issued quarantines for people who had been in contact with infected patients.

These quarantines were pretty short, and they affected only a few people. They were nothing even close to the frenzy we've seen this year. But some blasted the Ebola quarantines as much too strict. Criticism came from the Obama administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci, socialist activists, and others. A quarantined medical worker said, "This is an extreme that is really unacceptable, and I feel like my basic human rights have been violated."

That was considered "extreme" only 6 years ago!

Fauci recommended only monitoring - no quarantine.

When Florida ordered only monitoring, some infectious disease experts said even that was too strict.

How did the approach to pandemics change so much in only 6 years? Why do people put up with it, when they didn't put up with anything even close to it in 2014? I don't know about Zoom, but we certainly had YouTube in 2014, so they can't say it's because we didn't have it then. Many public officials double down on their coronavirus policies even as the caseload shrinks as immunity builds. At the end of the year when there's just a handful of cases, will we all have the doors to our homes welded shut?

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