Workers at US quarantine base accosted over fears of spreading coronavirus
- Recent chartered flights have sent hundreds of people back to the United States
- They are being held in quarantine at military bases in California, Texas and Nebraska
“Please understand that people on and off the base are not at increased risk for exposure to the new virus, and we don’t restrict people who don’t actually pose any risk,” public health officer Dr Cameron Kaiser said in a letter to the community.
“They have had no contact with the evacuees, whose area is fully separated from base personnel. You do not need to exclude household or family members of MARB personnel, nor do you need to require them to obtain unnecessary ‘clearance letters’ from a physician or health authority. They pose no greater risk than anyone else.”
Kaiser said that some base workers have been accosted while in uniform.
To date, no one at the base has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, including two children who were hospitalised for fevers and have since tested negative for the virus. There have been 13 cases confirmed in the US: one of them was among those evacuated from China to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego.
Evacuees there have described taking Zumba and accounting classes to help pass the time.
“When people hear quarantine, they think of the zombie apocalypse, movies like World War Z,” Matthew McCoy, the theme park designer on the base, told The Washington Post last week.
“But the reality is it’s what you make of it.”
Officials do not expect any positive cases to surface among the group, which landed at March Air Reserve Base on January 29. Those evacuees were expected to be released from their two-week quarantine on Tuesday.
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Unlike medical staff, including health care workers from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and nurses from Riverside University Health System-Public Health, base workers have not been in direct contact with the group.
The CDC has previously said that quarantined individuals do not pose a threat to the larger community.
The CDC mandated a quarantine – the first in more than 50 years – on January 31 for those fleeing the epicentre of the virus in Wuhan, China. The order, which did not align with the World Health Organisation’s recommendation advising against travel bans, has prompted health workers to scramble and stirred panic within communities.
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There is no clear explanation for why the US government issued a mandatory quarantine. While a quarantine is one of the only tools that may help mitigate the spread of the virus, as no vaccine currently exists, experts have said it’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of a modern-day quarantine – a practice developed in the 14th century in Italy to prevent plague epidemics from spreading to coastal cities from ships that had returned to port in Venice.
The coronavirus outbreak was confirmed before it hit American soil, unlike the 2009 H1N1 influenza, commonly known as the swine flu – a disease that infected more than 60 million and killed more than 12,000 in the US but did not result in a mandatory quarantine order.
Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases, said that while a quarantine is unprecedented, officials hope it will keep the virus contained, as it’s believed to be travelling directly from China.
Politics also could have something to do with the decision, said Jennifer Nuzzo, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security.
“I do believe that politics played a role in our decision to implement these quarantines and travel (restrictions). It’s not what health officials were talking about a few days earlier,” she said, adding that politicians’ calling on the government to expand efforts is a “knee-jerk” reaction whenever a new virus emerges.
The State Department has said that more than 800 people have been evacuated from Wuhan. The majority have remained in quarantine at facilities in California tapped by the Department of Defence.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
