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Webcams to Enforce Singapore Quarantine
magarity writes "Singapore has hired a private security firm to install internet connected webcams in homes of persons quarantined for SARS in order to watch them to see if they go out. They are considering adding electronic wristbands as well. 9 of the 490 persons have broken the quarantine despite a fine of 10,000 singapore dollars ($5,621US). Just over 100 people worldwide have died from SARS so far."
Before you start on about 1984, this is happening in Singapore, not the US.
And to head off the inevitable Ashcroft / Patriot Act recriminations, please offer actual *proof* of claims that our civil liberties are being eroded.
hey dickhead - if it truly has a 4% mortality rate, that will kill 1/25 people.
thats at least one student in a highschool class.
at least one person in your extended family.
it does need to be quarantined, or we are all fscked.
... hi bingo
What makes SARS scary is the fact that we really don't know how it spreads. Also, the quickness with which the disease is spreading is also another reason to scare people. Like someone said in an above comment...it's just a common cold really. I would like to see the tracking system for a common cold and how that spreads around the world.
It's only 4% because people are acting quickly to try and stop it from spreading. I live and work around Toronto (which is one of the places where SARS has shown up with a vengence in Canada), and believe me, it's a big freakin' deal. I had to go the doctor for treatment of strep throat and there was a form I had to fill out about SARS and every medical person there had a filter mask on and wouldn't go NEAR you until they determined you weren't a SARS risk.
Like some others have said, how would YOU feel if someone you knew was one of those 4%. I think your knee would jerk pretty high.
The 4% mortality rate is before all of the hospitals are full and before the world's supply of available respirators is exhausted. If 1,000,000 people in one country catch this, things could be different.
I'm just hoping that this virus mellows out a little bit as it goes through multiple generations in humans, as some viruses have been known to do. That might be the only way it will slow down.
This would mean, for example, that in a few years we may have airborne varient strains of other viruses. Now, should an airborne strain of some slow infection cycle be created (like HIV/AIDS, or a pneumonia with a very slow cycle), then most of the world will be infected before the first casualty occurs. Obviously this is fatal situation for mankind. It's not the quick diseases like ebola that we have to fear, it's the slow ones.
Hope it doesn't happen, but with population densities growing I expect that it will.
Comments?
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
It's too early to state a mortality rate for SARS. Most of the people who have the syndrome were diagnosed much more recently than the first batch of victims, and we don't know how many of the current patients will survive. Simply looking at the number of people who have already died compared to the number of current cases (like some reporters have tried) does not give you reliable statistics in this case.
Also, the seriousness of an epidemic is determined by communicability as well as mortality. A disease that infects half the world population with 4% mortality is much more serious than one that infects just a few people with 50% mortality.
...which killed upwards of 20 MILLION people, had a mortality rate of 3%.
SARS seems to be *at least* as transmissible as the 1918 flu was.
That's why.
The whole plan, as far as I can see, is to eradicate the disease. It's in a very early stage right now, and if we can completely stop its spread and cure those who have it, then we will have no carriers of the disease at all. Do you know how many lives will be saved and how much work would become completely unnecessary if it's eradicated? We will not have to develop treatment for it. We will not have to develop a vaccine. We will not have to educate the public about it. Millions of people (or even hundreds of millions or billions of people) will never get sick.
If eradication can be accomplished through extremely vigilant quarantine, etc., then all the resources that might be spent fighting SARS can be spent fighting other diseases, like say AIDS.
For a bit of info on the benefits / feasibility of eradication, see here.
If you'll read the article, you'll see that 1984 parallels don't really work.
Those quarantined "will be called at random intervals daily and requested to turn on the camera and present themselves in front of the camera to show their presence," the ministry said.
The cameras stay off until the person turns it on. It's no more intrusive than someone knocking on your door and requesting to see that you're there (which is intrusive, but not frightingly so). Since the camera is under the control of the person under quarantine, this is more similar to being a video phone than 1984-type constant surveillance.
Just involving technology doesn't make something dystopian; how technology is used does. (The tracking wrist band for lawbreakers, something we do in the USA for people under house arrest, is a bit greyer.)
Yes, it is that bad. Malaria isn't contagious. If SARS isn't contained, then a lot more than a million people could die. Consider what could happen if SARS spread to Africa, where a significant percentage of the population is infected with an immune-suppressing virus (HIV).
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
The mortality rate of driving a car is 4%?!? Maybe, maybe in a lifetime of driving, but even in that case 4% sounds too much. As for smoking, again in a lifetime and you can choose not to smoke. SARS spreads and kills much quicker than that. If it is let loose, without a cure, it will kill a LOT more than 4% of the population.
Hell that's not a bad idea as far as I'm concerned. These people are under quarrantine for a reason. I see no problem with shooting them if they refuse to comply. We know that people who have it can spread it. These 9 people are putting the lives of too many at risk.
You're not sufficiently paranoid. OK, maybe you are, in a sort of Howard Huges microbial way, but if you'll turn your creative anxieties a different direction for a moment -- to the powers of the state -- maybe you'll understand why death penalties for violating quarantine are a bad plan. What's to keep a state from indefinitely detaining someone in their house -- or hell, just shooting them -- by arbitrarily declaring them quarantined? Who's going to check on them and keep the state honest? By keeping the penalty for breaking a quarantine lower (say, monetary, a few hundred/thousand dollars), you get a safety valve for such problems.
(And this leaves aside the moral problems with shooting someone breaking a quarantine, real or supposed... especially with SARS. Not particularly more deadly than the flu. There might be a case to be made for Ebola, which'll kill 90% of its victims, but killing someone who is a vector for a 5% fatal illness, even a virulent one, is trading a probable death for a certain one).
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
You're completely missing the point. Measels are understood, can be treated and even vaccinated against. They don't spread easily. This desease has infected tons of hospital staff and even killed WHO employees. These are people that are used to dealing with sick people, and still they are getting sick. That's a problem. It's not just a matter of the mortality rate, but also how infectious it is. And this one seems to be quite easily transmitted. If a single person with SARS goes in supermarket and sneezes nicely, infects 10 people, who infect 100 people and so on, then that one ass that broke the quarantine, could literally kill thousands by their (just like your) ignorance. Sure people die in much larger numbers of other deseases, but until we understand this virus or whatever it is better, this is exactly what should happen. The WHO and the CDC are doing a great job trying to tame this one.
Reinard
No kidding. This thing is being reported as the kiss of death. This is the first time I've seen ANYTHING like the following in ANY news report:
Around two-thirds of people diagnosed with SARS in Singapore have recovered.
I wish someone would have said that earlier. It's the last line in the linked article, and it almost seems like an afterthought.
Why is it just like the media to never say "Oh, yeah, and people really ARE surviving this disease."
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Part of the problem is out over-reliance on anti-bacterial soaps|sponges|cuttingboard|etc.
The more we 'sanitize' our society the more susceptible we all are when a big bad bug comes along. Personally, I keep myself clean and all, but I will not use anti-bacterial products, with the excpetions of neosporin when I cut myself. The minute amounts of bactieria, firuses, molds, etc that I probably ingest build my immune system.
Its not a statistically good sampling, but of my friends that are anti-bacterial everything, and my friends that are more like me. The ones that dont use anti-bacterial products tend to get sick less often, and are sick for shorter durations than the people I know that are nuts about anti-bacterial products.
So I think we need to watch out for these sanitary guidelines - too much is a bad thing.
I agree, I'm all for the complete extinction of the human race. But I'm still a big believer in common courtesy, so...
You first.
i thought "About four per cent of patients with SARS die."
so it doesn't kill 1 in 25 people. it kills 1 in 25 SARS-infected people.
with estimated 6,302,309,691 population at the moment, your chance of catching it is 0.00476% (currently around 3000 people infected)
so your chance of dying of SARS should be 0.00017%
probably one in a small town will die, or one extended family member in my whole family generations (dated back to 2000BC) will also die.
Malaria requires a mosquito vector to spread. SARS does not. A CDC official recently said that SARS wasn't [soon] contained, everybody on earth will get it. Nobody is likely to have natural immunity because is it is a recombinant or (less likely) mutation of a coronavirus - thus a new organism.
If it has an animal host, we are screwed. We either all get it, or we get immunization.
If not, it may be able to cause it to burn out through quarantine and other infection control measures.
One thing not shown in the statistics is the number of people with SARS who do not get sick enough to get treatment. That is a two-sided issue...
If there are none or only a few, then we may still be able to contain the disease, but the morbidity (for example, 40% of patients needing respirators) and mortality (around 4%) remain high.
If there are a lot, we will probably not be able to contain the disease, but the serious illness and fatality rates will (by definition) be significantly lower.
The only good weather is bad weather.