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The national plan to try to stop the new coronavirus from spreading any further might fracture international trade, violate people’s rights, and make untenable the workloads of local and state public health departments. It almost certainly won’t slow the virus.
That’s the word from people trying to sort out what US secretary of health and human services Alex Azar announced last Friday. The plan: Starting last Sunday, US citizens who’ve been to Hubei Province in China (the apparent center of the outbreak), get 14 days of mandatory quarantine when they return home.
US citizens who’ve been anywhere in China get health screening at airports and 14 days of self-quarantine—staying home, basically, with health workers monitoring them. Noncitizens who’ve been to China in the last two weeks are banned from entering the country.
Travel bans and quarantines are a centuries-old answer to the spread of disease. They’re also exactly what the World Health Organization asked everyone not to do. The same WHO committee that recommended calling the virus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern explicitly said the measures to stop it should include treatment, tracing of contacts, and social distancing, but not “any travel or trade restriction.” That’s because almost no one in the game thinks that works.
“The travel ban on foreign nationals is counterproductive, unethical, and violates international law. There’s little evidence that a person who’s been to mainland China but not in the hot zone would be exposed to the virus, and there are far less restrictive measures we could use,” says Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown University. “I think it’s a huge overreach, and I worry that the White House is lurching from complacency to panic and overreaction
