Why quarantine

Cdc-media Low Resolution Video. For the Travel Industry. United States Quarantine Stations. Related Links. Get Started. Why are these three terms so important? What does quarantine mean? What happens when you are quarantined? Currently, the CDC recommends: Make it a staycation: Avoid leaving the house unless absolutely necessary.

Call ahead: While your local or state health department will most likely keep tabs on your health, you may need to see your doctor, too. Please call ahead BEFORE you visit any of our clinics so that we can take steps to prevent others from getting infected. Worried about Fido? But it may still be good to still use caution. Wash, rinse, repeat: Hygiene is an integral part of this, even at home. Hand washing should be your first line of defense when under quarantine.

Social distancing includes, but is not limited to: Talking to your supervisor, manager, or employer about the possibility of working from home where possible.

Closing schools or switching to online classes. Avoiding non-essential trips in the community. If possible, limit or consider cancelling group gatherings.

If you have meetings planned, consider doing them virtually instead of in person. A quarantine is a period of time during which a person or animal that has or might have a disease is isolated to prevent the disease from spreading. Opposed to lockdowns as currently in place to limit SARS-CoV-2, in which movement of people within cities or countries is limited to various degrees, a quarantine refers to the strict isolation of a single person or animal.

There are documented disease control institutional responses to the plague epidemic in Italy in —, but mentions of isolation practices to prevent spread of leprosy can already be found in the Bible although some references to preventing spread of infectious diseases might be quite cryptic.

This was the time sailors coming to Venice from Plague-endemic areas in the 14th and 15th century had to wait on the boat before disembarking. Why precisely 40 days? The reason is not known, but interestingly at the time a period of 30 days was also occasionally applied. The length of 40 days as eponym for quarantine had historical reasons and might have derived from Hippocrates theories, the Pythagorean theory of numbers, the period of time Jesus spent in the desert, or the time believed to be necessary for dissipating the pestilential miasma from ill bodies.

Nowadays, a quarantine does not have a standard length and is defined by the incubation time of the suspected infectious agent. And even for SARS-CoV-2, with quarantine measures for travelers used as a strategy by many governments to limit the spread of the virus, time can vary from a few days to several weeks. When COVID broke into our lives in , non-clinical interventions quarantining, hand-washing, wearing face masks, etc.

As a result, quarantining became part of the daily vocabulary of our new normal together with terms like virus, vaccine, heard immunity, antibodies, and infection.

A lot of people just went on Spring Break, were preparing for vacations, were looking forward to summer plans, graduations, and weddings. Even if you think you are not infected, you still might be; it can take from 2 to 14 days for the virus to incubate and start showing symptoms, and many people who carry it are asymptomatic. In these environments, especially when food and drinks are involved, it is more likely that people will spread microscopic saliva particles through breathing, talking, coughing, sneezing, and laughing.

These particles not only travel through the air but can also land on glasses, plates, doorknobs, silverware, tables, and other surfaces that people are highly likely to touch without even thinking about it. Now imagine that everyone is going about business as usual: having get-togethers, going out, moving in and out of restaurants and shops, coming into contact with one another and touching the same doorknobs, bouquets, arm rests, handrails, guestbooks, etc.