Reflections while under SARS quarantine

Quarantine for SARS, Taiwan

During the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Taiwan, >150,000 persons were quarantined, 24 of whom were later found to have laboratory-confirmed SARS-coronavirus (SARS-CoV) infection. Since no evidence exists that SARS-CoV is infective before the onset of symptoms and the quarantined persons were exposed but not symptomatic, we thought the quarantine's effectiveness s...

SARS Control and Psychological Effects of Quarantine, Toronto, Canada

As a transmissible infectious disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was successfully contained globally by instituting widespread quarantine measures. Although these measures were successful in terminating the outbreak in all areas of the world, the adverse effects of quarantine have not previously been determined in a systematic manner. In this hypothesis-generating study supported...

The concept of quarantine in history: from plague to SARS.

The concept of 'quarantine' is embedded in health practices, attracting heightened interest during episodes of epidemics. The term is strictly related to plague and dates back to 1377, when the Rector of the seaport of Ragusa (then belonging to the Venetian Republic) officially issued a 30-day isolation period for ships, that became 40 days for land travellers. During the next 100 years similar...

Public health law and ethics: lessons from SARS and quarantine.

The final size of a SARS epidemic model without quarantine

In this article, we present the continuing work on a SARS model without quarantine by Hsu and Hsieh [Sze-Bi Hsu, Ying-Hen Hsieh, Modeling intervention measures and severity-dependent public response during severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak, SIAM J. Appl. Math. 66 (2006) 627–647]. An “acting basic reproductive number” ψ is used to predict the final size of the susceptible population. We...