Can you imagine a situation where London is effectively shut down?

[ElderAve]

Or Manchester, Birmingham? Deliberately by the government?

How bad would things have to be before those steps were taken? And how would the population respond?

TBH, I'm struggling with the compulsory quarantine of a few hundred people.

Do you think there is already "a plan"?

I got chicken pox as an adult and was reminded by the GP that I was in the contagious stage. I quarantined myself alone in my apartment for 5 days. Why would I deliberately spread that to other people? I didn't feel that my human rights were being curtailed. It was just basic common sense and decency. The quarantined returnees from Wuhan should feel the same. 14 days of laying about, reading and watching TV is hardly going to scar them for life.

OP

It's actually not correct that it's only spread by coughs and sneezes.

I have been following the reporting closely and reading all of the medical papers produced:

• It has an incubation period of up to 24 days

• People can spread the disease all through the incubation period including when they have no symptoms

• It can be spread by droplets (coughs, sneezes), aerosol (breathing the same air in very close contact), formites (from surfaces, it can live on surfaces for up to 28 days in the right circumstances but more typically at least 2-5 days) and fecal-oral route

• An example is the Diamond Princess cruise. The first person who caused this outbreak had left the cruise ship before any of the people infected had got on the ship

• One man in China had had no known contact with any other cases, they traced back via CCTV and found that he stood next to another known infected person at a market stall for 15 seconds

• An example of spreading before being symptomatic is the British man who spread the illness to 4 or 5 people in the chalet in France before he'd had any symptoms (he didn't have symptoms until back in the UK)

I work in public health (infectious diseases but not anything to do with coronavirus so this isn’t inside knowledge in any way). There would most certainly be plans in place for how to deal with serious public health security threats. The plans for quarantine that have been rolled out so far surely have been in place as a blueprint somewhere for a long time. The details may need to be filled in given incubation periods and modes of transmission, but these definitely aren’t being just made up willy nilly.

I don’t know what will happen but I work in London (at a site linked to where some patients are being quarantined) and commute in from outside. I have 2 small dc and a long term health condition. I bought a weekly ticket this week instead of my usual monthly one, just in case I decide I feel more comfortable working from home.

I think it’s really hard to say at this point what will really happen. I think public health officials are being (intentionally) vague about outcomes. We don’t know how unwell people who are infected are becoming and how easy the recovery is or who is most at risk of complications, which makes it hard to determine how much risk there is as an individual person going about your day.

Remember 7 July 2005 and the Underground and buses in central London stopping completely for the rest of the day?

There are loads of contingency plans and frequent exercises - it can be very like live role-playing without the costumes. Huge amounts of mathematical modelling goes into the plans based on known diseases, human behaviour, known transport models, distance of the average sneeze, etc.

I once worked on plans for a 1918-style flu epidemic - what would be the effect on daily life in a big city if a quarter of adults were in bed? Turned out that the main problem to begin with would be lack of delivery drivers, so more plans were created to address that.

I had the joy of trying to move house during the 2000 fuel crisis (luckily my landlord owned a taxi), and have worked on contingency plans a lot since.

OP, it’s all under the Civil Contingencies Act
There are emergency planners at all levels of government who plan and deal with this sort of stuff.

As you’re “struggling” with compulsory quarantine on a large scale, what do you suggest instead would be more appropriate to contain Coronavirus - and ultimately prevent unnecessary deaths that may otherwise occur if it is spread?

It might seem nuclear but it’s surely in the best interests of the public as a whole, it’s not being implemented for no good reason. In the UK, it would only happen if the carrier refused voluntary quarantine so it’s a last resort.

The Hove man is apparently a super spreader. He managed to pass it on to personal contacts in Brighton, one of which being a GP employee who presumably comes into contact with large numbers of the general public daily - including those who otherwise have compromised immune systems and may be at higher risk of severe symptoms.

There’s nothing to suggest that the GP employee passed it on to anyone else, but it’s concerning how quickly this could have spread to the wider public. Especially baring in mind that the Hove “super spreader” managed to pass on the virus to several people whilst being asymptomatic

FIL was working in emergency planning in the early 1970s. The first thing he did was move home with MIL and baby DP to a village exactly one mile outside the area of total destruction, that had its own natural water supply (coming from nowhere near the estimated fallout area), access to natural resources like wood and wildlife, that only had three entry points and where the prevailing winds would blow radioactivity out to sea.

He only admitted this two years ago - MIL spent their entire marriage and ten years of separation thinking that he'd made them up sticks and move to the arse end of nowhere on a whim/there was probably a woman involved.

Of course there will be plans for all kinds for scenarios and if necessary they would be implemented.

I am quite worried as both my children have severe asthma so are more vulnerable. I really hope people would self isolate but a lot of people are incredibly selfish sadly.

@MitziK exactly one mile outside the area of total destruction sounds very specific. Total destruction from what? Tsunami? Earthquake? Nuclear bomb? I live in a place where should a missile fall it wouldn’t need to be nuclear to cause massive nuclear damage. It is not the only site in Britain where this is the case. How did he know that he was exactly one mile outside an area of unknowable size, and yet still far enough away from it that his water supply would be unaffected by fallout? The meltdown of both Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors caused fallout and contamination for many mailers around, in fact there was fallout from Chernobyl found in places as far away as Wales. If it was a bomb, how would he know which country was sending this bomb, how big it would be, the construction and detonation and blast radius of it? I’m sure he was an expert in his field, but one of the things that is very specific to disaster management is that one solution does not fit all disaster scenarios and a large degree of flexibility and ability to adapt a plan in a rapidly changing scenario is essential.

There will be contingencies and plans in place for a scenario that involves a highly contagious disease arriving on our shores. I would not expect it to be quite as slick as people might anticipate though. Contingencies take time and effort to get into place, and they will be put in place against a backdrop of millions of people all not behaving exactly as they ought to.

And actually, no, I don't understand why they are quarantining people without symptoms, as we're being told it's spread through coughs and colds, so there's no risk until symptoms develop.

The virus has a 14 day incubation period before symptoms show, but you can still be infectious within this time.

Thats why people are being QUARANTINED regardless of symptoms

Also, quarantine is the perfect term to describe whats happening -

"a state, period, or place of isolation in which people or animals that have arrived from elsewhere or been exposed to infectious or contagious disease are placed."

I think you're being a tad inflammatory

You really don't understand why precautions beyond the minimum level might be taken to contain the spread of a deadly virus?

@backinthebox They lived in a Naval city and were from a Naval family - even the GMs were involved in military comms in the war - one would tap out messages in Morse when distressed and in the full grip of dementia.

The most likely scenarios were that there would be an accident with weaponry or, at the time, the most likely size atomic weapon that would target such an important base as part of a first strike.

He was very specific. That's the point. The planning also acknowledged that there was a difference if a missile was ground detonated or an airburst - largely that they'd all be fucked, wherever they lived, so it wasn't worth moving further out - which is why they didn't later on when the average Soviet capabilities increased, although he had been considering it until new intelligence/information about it was made available to them.

Even now, because I know somebody who still does something similar, I know exactly where the cut off point is for projections of a dirty bomb going off, a small conventional nuclear device and chemical weaponry.

FIL was quite enthusiastic about where I live (before he ever started talking about his work in the 1960s and early 70s). Turns out if shit hits the fan and we're 'lucky' with what is used, I've got 20 minutes to make it exactly half a mile uphill - if I manage that, the geography and climate conditions of where I live means that the projected dispersal cloud/fallout will collapse down and miss us.

Of course, FIL did say that also gave us the freedom to be able to say 'fuck surviving this' and run half a mile in the opposite direction. He's very interesting to talk to now he's old and doesn't give a shite about the OSA anymore.

DP says the one type of programme he would never allow to be on were the nuclear attack type ones like Threads or documentaries about nuclear bombs, though. I suppose he'd seen a bit too much original source material to want to deal with the sanitised for TV stuff.

I really don't see what the problem is. Of course it's really shit if you had your wedding/last chance to see a dying relative over the quarantine and had to miss out, but nobody is being left to starve, and I assume they have Netflix and Kindle.

People have become mucky buggers in the years since vaccinations. We no longer fear death from the likes of diphtheria, measles or scarlet fever, so we have become lax about the correct protocol around infectious diseases. Read any Victorian or pre vax era literature when there's an illness - people are quarantined, rooms stripped and deep cleaned, children and the vulnerable moved to the country if possible, toys and possessions burned to prevent spread. There were whole books devoted to how to nurse someone at home, the expectation being that the woman of the house should do it, it could go on for weeks or months, and there was a possibility that death would result at the end of it.

14 days of hospital food and having to tell work you're not going to be in for the foreseeable is nothing in comparison