August 8, 2022
Dear editor;
The monkeypox outbreak has been declared a national health emergency. The first case was diagnosed May 19. By June 3, there were 21 cases and now, we are up to more than 10,000.
What did authorities do to prevent the first few cases from spreading? If the past is any guide, the answer is… not much. Oh, they isolated patients who tested positive and monitored those who had been in contact with them. They started to produce more vaccines, but the cat is now clearly out of the bag, probably because the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) was unable to utilize the most effective means of controlling any epidemic, an early and aggressive quarantine.
Something similar happened at the start of the ongoing COVID epidemic. When we first learned of the disease in Wuhan, China, Australia, and several other countries immediately put all travelers from China into a two-week quarantine under guard in hotels. It seems to have paid off. Americans flying in from China during the same time period simply left the airports and went home, some to infect their friends, families, and neighbors. If the U.S. had taken the same steps that Australia did, it’s likely that our death rate would have been similar to that of Australia, suggesting that more than 850,000 Americans who died of COVID would still be alive today. BTW, Australia didn’t sacrifice its economy. Their per capita GDP has been less affected than ours throughout the pandemic.
We arguably dropped the ball when the first case of AIDS was discovered in July 1981. Patients were not isolated. By year’s end, there were 337 cases reported, with 130 deaths. As of today, more than 700,000 have died from AIDS in this country.
Over the years, we have decided that the right of people to move about freely trumps the right to life of those who might contract fatal diseases, directly or indirectly, from those infected individuals. With more then 1.7 million dead from AIDS and COVID, perhaps it is time to reexamine this belief. We’re not focusing on the lockdowns on millions of people; rather, the question is whether it is reasonable to restrict the activities of small numbers of individuals for short periods of time only in the early stages of a disease outbreak.
In the case of AIDS, a lifetime illness, the quarantine question is a truly difficult one, but the quarantines necessary to stop the spread of COVID or monkeypox are on the order of two weeks or so. Do we really believe that allowing a few thousand people a couple of weeks of freedom to move about is worth sacrificing hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives later on?
Craig Zabel, Sugar Grove