To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and “I”

Etymologia: Quarantine

Ebola and quarantine.

The governors of a number of states, including New York and New Jersey, recently imposed 21-day quarantines on health care workers returning to the United States from regions of the world where they may have cared for patients with Ebola virus disease. We understand their motivation for this policy — to protect the citizens of their states from contracting this often-fatal illness. This approac...

Quarantine Stressing Voluntary Compliance

A 1-day table-top exercise in San Diego, California, in December 2004 emphasized voluntary compliance with home quarantine to control an emerging infectious disease outbreak. The exercise heightened local civilian-military collaboration in public health emergency management. Addressing concerns about lost income by residents in quarantine was particularly challenging.

Predicting Quarantine Failure Rates

Preemptive quarantine through contact-tracing effectively controls emerging infectious diseases. Occasionally this quarantine fails, however, and infected persons are released. The probability of quarantine failure is typically estimated from disease-specific data. Here a simple, exact estimate of the failure rate is derived that does not depend on disease-specific parameters. This estimate is ...

Extending Pereboom's Quarantine System

Derk Pereboom (2014) argues that human beings do not have the kind of free will required for moral responsibility. Pereboom argues that we should use a system of incarceration for criminal offenders based on a quarantine analogy. Patients in quarantine scenarios are not responsible for their sickness, are separated from society because of the danger they pose, and are prepared for release as so...