This used to get tacked up to your front door
This was adapted from a post on The Herman Cain Medal Recognizing notable people who impede public health efforts, and aid the spread of contagious diseases. Dishonor a public figure, a contagious workplace or event, nominations welcomed.
Another essay, this one entirely speculation based on some observations and history (having been wasting oxygen for longer than the three score of speeches). Chances are this is all old hat to people that study behavioral public health. I don’t have my resident public health expert to ask any more. (cancer, wife, May)
In other words, I am guessing why some people act in sometimes counterproductive ways, and I officially don’t know what I am talking about. But hey, it sounds plausible, and unlike many I am telling you up front it stands a good chance of being completely wrong. But like everyone else with a keyboard and a web page, I won’t let that stop me from trying to inflict my opinions on you.
-dp-
I saw some statistics recently about how well people follow quarantine rules these days. The data was from the UK, but… If you were supposed to be quarantining, but didn’t feel sick, the chances of you following the rules the full interval was around 20%, If you did feel ill, the numbers were better, but still well under 50%.
Believe it or not, there was a time when Americans actually were familiar with and usually followed quarantine restrictions. The local health department would declare a household under quarantine, and it mostly worked.
People would stay home. They weren’t happy, but they obeyed. Kids would get schoolwork delivered regularly, often by a visiting nurse, who would also check the progress of the disease (and that everyone was present). And all the kids had to stay home, not just the sick ones.
When was this you ask? Well the idea of quarantine goes back a very long time, there were leper colonies more than 1,000 years ago. A formal system for shipping with a specific flag to be flown, and a designated (and distant) mooring dates from the time of the black death.
For urban areas, widespread creation of health officials (separate from doctors) starting as early as the 1900’s, and lasting up until the early 1960’s. There were actual health officers and visiting nurses. You don’t hear about it now, with the exception of commercial food preparation inspection.
What happened? We developed vaccines or treatments for a lot of the deadlier diseases, Polio, TB, Measles, Typhus. Suddenly what was left were the milder ones, things that if an otherwise healthy kid did catch it, they would rarely wind up in a coffin, on a respirator or riding a wheelchair.
smallpox notice
Now you have to be in your 70’s or older to remember the sign that the health department stuck to your door. Your neighbors saw it, and would rat you out, if you didn’t obey, it was taken very seriously. I am in my 60’s, and have no memory of being subject to it personally, but kids only 4 or 5 years older than me did remember. (I did get scarlet fever when I was around 1 years old, so perhaps our door did get so decorated)
However I do know about the signs, and the rules attached, as even though they had begun to fall out of fashion, they still taught us schoolkids about them, starting with the first graders. We couldn’t read most of the words on the sign, but we learned what they looked like, and to stay out of anyplace that had one posted. (and as a sign as to how every generation has its own dose of threatening insanity, instead of active shooter drills, we also learned about fallout shelter signs)
It is a wonderful thing that pandemics are rare things in today’s first world. And a lot of the really dangerous diseases haven’t been part of the memories of society for more than a generation. But it does mean that we don’t know how to act when a new, fast spreading, disease turns up.
We have already seen some of this, with the anti-vax crew and outbreaks of Measles popping up. When I was (calculating) about 4 the first Measles vaccine was approved.
I remember the car ride into the city, and my mother picking up a cooler packed with ice (might have even been dry ice, she didn’t let me play with it), then driving to the doctors, where me and my younger sister got the human posterior pincushion and lollypop treatment. (with the pincushion part being why it is so clear in my mind)
Asking about it some years later, she told me It was a Measles vaccine, and it had apparently been available for about a week. There is a fair chance that we were the first kids our pediatrician administered it to.
Turns out my mother had lost her 3rd grade BFF to measles, (in the 1940’s) and was going to have no part of it for us, thank you very much. Now nobody knows someone that caught the disease, never mind died from it. They may not believe its real, or that it can be that dangerous.
So without the direct memory, a lot will blow it off when it proves inconvenient. It did help that quarantine was rarely longer than 30 days, back then. I don’t really know how things worked for the adults, I only ever learned the kid specific rules.
Unlike a proper pundit, I don’t have a clue as to how to solve the problem. I am just reporting observations, someone with different skills than mine will need to turn the observation into persuasion. (that’s assuming its even close to correct)
