I’m listening to the news this morning and I hear that a bunch of people from a Hewlett Packard plant in (I believe) North York (which is North of Toronto) are being quarantined. The reason for this is that someone who works there potentially has it. The thing that gets me about this is that this idiot was under quarantine when he decided to go to work. How much more stupid and selfish can you be?
A couple of days ago two students are different schools in and around Toronto who were suppose to be under quarantine decided that they couldn’t miss class and/or exams. Once again stupidity reigns supreme.
How can you be so self-centered and selfish that you would be willing to potentially infect completely strangers with a disease that there is no known cure for? These people should be charged with “endangering the public” or something like that for their stupidity.
4 Comments
we are rather badly hit here too in singapore, and we do have quarantine laws that if broken, you will be charged.
I’ve taken the habit of telling anyone I know who is talking about SARS the fact that only 4 out of 100 people with SARS will end up dead, just to make them less worried. It made me think that maybe someone has told those stupid people the same thing and that was the reason they decided to leave the quarantine, because they didn’t think it would be all that dangerous, which is just plain wrong. Now I’m wondering if I should stop spreading that fact. Hrm.
Firda is right — SARS has the same death rate as the common flu. The problem is that we know so little about it and its prevention. It’s thought to be either transmitted by “droplets” or “airborne”, which are somewhat similar, but have entirely different implications.
The government in Hong Kong, where the outbreak was thought to begin, did a poor job preventing the spread of the disease. The whole “no losing face” philosophy goes entirely against the principal of keeping the citizens safe, but Tung Chee-hwa, the city’s Chief Executive, just doesn’t get it. They didn’t decide to quarantine patients until a month after the outbreak began. Can one be more stupid than that?
Ugh. The more I think about how useless he is as my hometown’s head official, the angrier I get…
Two good sources on SARS I’ve found are flyingchair.net (Hong Kong) and pekingduck.blogspot.com (Beijing). Both are fantastic writers and eyewitnesses. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes scary, usually right-on.