As Coronavirus Fears Intensify, Effectiveness Of Quarantines Is Questioned: NYT

(1 hr. ago). WUHAN, China — Excerpts:

...China’s attempts to curb the disease’s spread — essentially cordoning off the major cities in the province of Hubei, including its capital, Wuhan, a city of 11 million people — are a “public health experiment, the scale of which has not been done before,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. “Logistically, it’s stunning, and it was done so quickly.”

Whether the lockdowns will succeed in stemming the spread of the virus is a matter of debate by experts in public health and epidemiology. Some said the lockdowns would help, at least in theory. “Anything that is done that increases social distancing can help decrease the spread of the virus,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “If you do it right, it’s not impossible it will have positive impact.”

But doing it right at this scale has never been tried before anywhere in the world. “To put a ring around cities of this size and population is unprecedented,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan and author of the book “Quarantine.” Maintaining the lockdown will pose tremendous challenges, starting with the provision of food, fuel and medical care to millions of people. “It’s enormously difficult to do effectively, and also difficult to assess the effectiveness,” said Dr. Schaffner.

Other experts were skeptical that the travel restrictions would prove at all effective because they had probably come too late and the barriers would prove too permeable. Five million people had left Wuhan before travel out of the city was restricted, said the city’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang. It was a stunning disclosure that intensified questions about the government’s delayed response. “You can’t board up a germ. A novel infection will spread,” said Lawrence O. Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It will get out; it always does.”...

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