China’s lockdown of Wuhan and its surrounding areas to contain the coronavirus represents the first large-scale quarantine in modern times.
“The containment of a city hasn’t been done in the history of international public health policy,” said Shigeru Omi, who headed the World Health Organization’s Western Pacific Region during the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. “It’s a balance between respecting freedom of movement of people, and also prevention of further disease and public interest. It’s not a simple sort of thing; it’s very complex.”
Aside from raising questions about its probable effectiveness and implications for human rights, a quarantine could cause panic, public health experts said. The government will also have to ensure supplies of food, water and medical materials.
In modern times, quarantines have yielded limited results. A study in the Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology determined Toronto’s use of quarantine wasn’t effective in slowing SARS. An impoverished neighborhood in Liberia quarantined during an Ebola outbreak in 2014 responded with violent riots.
