The irony of the hantavirus quarantine
Can we finally have an honest conversation?
This week, the hantavirus outbreak officially ended. The Americans who had been quarantining can finally go get a coffee in public again, because we are past the 42-day window that defines the Andes virus incubation period.
CDC and HHS are calling the containment a success. And it is. A lot of unglamorous work went into keeping it small—with WHO leadership from the beginning; experts in global migration, rodent-borne disease, and special pathogens who understand this virus; the biocontainment teams in Omaha; the local and state health departments doing the daily monitoring.
But one thing also can’t be ignored: the Administration’s response was dripping with absolute, extreme irony.
American citizens were ordered to be held in a federal facility against their will after CDC’s own medical reviewer and other outside experts recommended they be allowed to be monitored at home. The orders were signed by Jay Bhattacharya as acting CDC director. This is the same guy who built a public profile arguing that the Covid-19 response went too far against medical freedom, now taking away more freedom from U.S. citizens than CDC scientists deemed necessary. (And an Administration that continues to discredit, undermine, and disparage scientists working during the Covid-19 response.) Eventually, after pushback from public health and states, the White House and HHS let the cruise ship passengers go quarantine at home, but also suggested extreme conditions, such as wearing ankle monitors.
Talking about plans (and criticizing other people’s plans) is easy; actually implementing plans in a real-world health emergency is much harder.
Now that it’s happening with Covid-19 contrarians, does this mean we can finally have an honest national reckoning? Can we finally have a serious conversation about the role of non-pharmacological interventions like social distancing, contact tracing, and masking, the trade-offs, where authority lies, and… humility?