The concept of “self-quarantining” is almost laughable, because it assumes a degree of personal responsibility. In the US today, it is known there is a very large lack of responsibility or a lack of seeing through the consequences of one’s actions. Therefore, responsibility requires a lot of trust, which is a thing difficult to find among a few people, let alone thousands.
What does one say then when one says that the state of California has asked over five thousand people to ‘self-quarantine’ over suspicions of having the highly contagious COVID-19 coronavirus?
Public-health officials in the U.S. are striving to keep tabs on thousands of Americans who have quarantined themselves at home after returning from mainland China to curtail the new coronavirus, adding to an epidemic response that is straining already-stretched local departments.
More than 5,400 people had been asked to self-quarantine in California alone as of Feb. 14, according to the California Department of Public Health. Hundreds more are self-quarantining in Georgia, Washington state, Illinois, New York and other states.
Public-health officials are following directions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Department to supervise these people, but many steps are being developed on the fly. States are using a variety of techniques to track people from calling in volunteers to make phone calls, to sending text messages and using electronic registries. (source)
These people will go to work.
They will shop in stores.
They will eat with others.
The virus will go with them, and yet its mechanisms of spreading and how its incubation period works are not understood.
Watch carefully as this in combination with other factors could lead to a pandemic.