"US Cities Would be Locked Down Under Pandemic..."

Isolation of households ... 'SIP' (Sheltering In Place) ... Quarentine ... they all mean the same thing: STAY PUT.
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Readymom
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Will the government quarantine people in a pandemic?

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PandemicFlu.gov

ABC TV Movie: Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America
http://www.pandemicflu.gov/news/birdfluinamerica.html

On Tuesday, May 9 at 8 p.m., the ABC television network aired a made-for-TV movie titled "Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America." The movie follows an outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu virus from its origins in a Hong Kong market through its mutation into a pandemic virus that becomes easily transmittable from human to human and spreads rapidly around the world.

The Department of Health and Human Services prepared a Viewer's Guide and some anticipated Questions and Answers to provide factual information for viewers of the movie. EHP.org NOTE: To See full range of questions, go to link listed above).

Many neighborhoods were quarantined in the film. Even the Governor of Virginia quarantined himself, his staff and his family from the rest of the world. Will the government quarantine people in a pandemic?

The purpose of quarantine is to separate people who have been potentially exposed to a contagious disease and may be infected but are not yet ill to stop the spread of that disease. The last large-scale quarantine measures that were imposed in this country were used in the early 20th century to contain outbreaks of plague, yellow fever, and smallpox.

Today, quarantine typically refers to confining potentially infected persons to their homes or community-based facilities, usually on a voluntary basis. Quarantine can be used for a defined group of people who may have been exposed at a public gathering, or who may have been exposed while traveling, particularly overseas. In extreme cases, quarantine could apply to an entire geographic area, in which case a community may be closed off by sealing its borders or by a barricade, known as a "cordon sanitaire".

In the case of pandemic influenza, quarantine may be one of the public health tools employed in the early days of an emerging pandemic if efforts are undertaken to contain the outbreak before it spreads too widely. Once a pandemic has begun to spread, quarantine is not likely to be effective in controlling the spread, and instead efforts may turn to "social distancing." Social distancing includes measures to increase distance between individuals, such as staying home when ill unless seeking medical care, avoiding large gatherings, telecommuting, and school closures.
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"US Cities Would be Locked Down Under Pandemic..."

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U.S. Cities Would be Locked Down, Quarantined Under Pandemic Flu Response Plan
http://www.naturalnews.com/023823.html

by David Gutierrez

(NaturalNews) The federal government would need to quarantine infected households and ban public gatherings to contain pandemic flu, according to a computer simulation study conducted by researchers from Virginia Tech and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"You wouldn't go out to the movies. You wouldn't congregate with people," said researcher Stephen Eubank. "You'd pretty much be staying home with the doors and windows battened down."

The consensus among health experts is that a pandemic, or global epidemic, of influenza is inevitable. The last such pandemic, in 1918, killed between 40 and 100 million people.

Because of the belief that a pandemic cannot be avoided, researchers are instead looking into ways to limit its effects. In the current study, researchers used a computer to model the hypothetical spread of flu pandemic in the city of Chicago under various containment scenarios. They found that a vigorous early response could reduce the infection rate by 80 percent.

"Depending on how fast it is spreading, it seems as though you really need to throw everything you can at it," Eubank said.

Under the containment scenario, people infected with or exposed to the disease would be confined to their homes, and schools and day-care centers would be shut down, as would places of public gathering like bars, restaurants and theaters. Offices and factories would remain open but would operate at reduced capacity due to quarantines.

The extreme measures would need to continue for months, until a vaccine was developed.

"We are not talking about simply shutting things down for a day or two like a snow day," Eubank said. "It's a sustained period for weeks or months."

The computer model assumed widespread compliance with the response plan, but Eubank says he doesn't anticipate that as a problem.

"In the context of a very infectious disease that is killing a large number of the people, I think large fractions of the population won't have a problem with these recommendations," he said.
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