Sat, Apr 26, 2003 page2

• Home quarantine causes headaches

  VIRUS Manpower shortages have meant that SARS suspects confined to their homes cannot be watched 24 hours a day, forcing health officials to improvise

  • By Melody Chen / STAFF REPORTER
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  Health authorities have warned they are facing an acute shortage of manpower to monitor home-quarantine orders and are trying to muster non-governmental resources to help combat the epidemic.

  Since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in the middle of March, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has issued thousands of home-quarantine notices to people potentially infected with the virus.

  Nevertheless, many are asking: just who is monitoring these isolated people to ensure they have not broken their quarantines?

  "To monitor the moves of all these people would require a huge amount of people, unless we can bring all of them to one place," Jack Wang (王鎮灝), senior specialist at the CDC's Division of Surveillance, said yesterday.

  The CDC, its local branches and local health departments have committed all their resources to distributing quarantine notices, tracing the conditions of quarantined people by phone and answering calls from an anxious public, Wang said.

  "We are working 17 to 18 hours every day right now," Wang said.

  He said that the health authorities don't have the manpower to monitor all quarantined people on a one-to-one basis.

  "In Taipei Municipal Hoping Hospital alone, about 1,000 health workers and patients were quarantined. As their families and relatives also need to be isolated, we have to quarantine more than 5,000 people," Wang said.

  When asked whether it is feasible to set up video cameras at household doorsteps to monitor whether people break their home quarantine, Wang said the measure might cause bigger problems.

  "We don't want to cause panic or discrimination amongst neighborhoods. If we set up camera videos on doorsteps, even garbage collectors and food deliverers would not dare to approach the households," Wang said.

  Wang admitted it is a great dilemma to choose between respect for human rights and strict quarantine measures.

  "We need to protect healthy people, but we also need to protect the privacy of infected people," Wang said.

  Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁), chairman of the government's SARS Advisory Committee and professor of epidemiology at National Taiwan University, said local governments may learn from the approach by the Taipei City Government to address the manpower shortage.

  Chen said yesterday he has discussed with Taipei Deputy Mayor Ou Chin-der (歐晉德), the city's social welfare bureau, health bureau and civil affairs bureau about how to cope with the manpower problems.

  "The city has asked for the help of borough wardens to monitor whether quarantined people have actually complied with the rules. Our health officials have reached their limit," Chen said.

  Chen urged borough wardens to pay attention to two matters while monitoring quarantined people.

  "First, they need to protect their privacy. Second, they also have to protect themselves," he said.

  Chen also said that moral persuasion may work better than video cameras in preventing people from breaking their quarantine.

  "Moreover, it would cost an awful lot to set up video cameras," Chen said.

  An official at Taipei's health bureau, who would only give his surname Hsu (許), said usually if a person is quarantined, his or her whole family would also be isolated.

  "In some cases, we would require the quarantined individuals to stay in their own rooms and demand that their family members wear facemasks," Hsu said.

  People in quarantine are not allowed to leave their rooms, but their family members would not need to be quarantined with them, Hsu added.

  Hsu also explained how city health officials monitor quarantined people.

  "First, our workers go to these people's houses every day to check their body temperatures," he said.

  As the health officials "cannot monitor the quarantined people 24 hours a day," they would call these people throughout the day to make sure they are at home, Hsu said.
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