AIBU to refuse to be held prisoner at work?

[KitKat1985]

www.theargus.co.uk/news/18227689.fresh-suspected-coronavirus-case-nurses-mill-view-hospital-held-quarantine/?fbclid=IwAR3IShE3kLzzULNr8qVGu-31Bxf_n4YbOVlDL1mXfm6CgQAdK1-XtTXRFCo

I'm a nurse in this Trust. The nurses involved have apparently been refused the right to leave the building and have bee there since yesterday because they treated a patient with suspected coronavirus. This in my opinion is complete overkill and they are essentially holding the staff like prisoners. Even if they were unlucky enough to get coronavirus, they won't immediately get ill and be contagious anyway, so why not just let them go home (maybe with facemasks etc on) and quarantine them there?! There's no way anyone is keeping me from going home from work.

I was going to say i see your point until you called it glorified flu and implied it was media scaremongering. This has nothing at all to do with the fucking media. China have built 2 hospitals in a matter of days. Several people have died very quickly. The chinese government know its serious. The british government and other countries governments have decided its serious enough to pay to have flights put on to return their own citizens. The world health organization says its serious and are worried and yet you a supposed nurse is claiming its nothing and you dont care about infecting others including your own family.

I agree holding them against thier will is not unfair. However it is more dangerous than the flu and in order for them to get home to be able to self isolate they would have to walk through the hospital to thier cars or public transport to get home potentially risking many other people.

hysteria largely fuelled by the media.

So good practice being put in place across the world to prevent the spread of this virus is media hysteria

Why if you got caught by accident and could be contagious, would you want your children to be that Ill?
How would you feel it a dozen people died because you wanted to sleep in your own bed?

Don’t be such a bloody fool, op

Maintaining a quarantine in a psychiatric unit would be a friggin nightmare. They just aren't set up for this sort of thing.

I dont know how I'd feel about been quarantined on my ward... my partner would have to take time off work to look after ds and the trust I work for would o doubt find a way to make it unbearable. Greater good and all that though.

@luanmapo You're missing my point. I'm not saying the staff shouldn't be quarantined. I'm pointing out they won't immediately be contagious so why not just let them go home and quarantine themselves there? The advice for most people who get the virus is to self-treat at home anyway. It's only a minority that are unlucky enough to have complications and need hospital treatment.

I thought the main reason for the quarantining was to try and stop it spreading to third world countries where there aren’t decent hospitals etc. Surely you would have been briefed on this and not just be thinking it’s just like flu and can’t do much damage.

It would be massively shit to be kept at work/ stuck in a cruise ship cabin and all the people quarantined have total sympathy from me. I don’t think anyone should just be saying that we shouldn’t bother trying to contain it though.

If you are a nurse , I don't want to be ill with you around!

Why would you go home and risk infecting two small children 😳

You would be irresponsible to self-quarantine if you have family at home

Fortunately, the govt - and nearly all govts around the world - can take emergency powers if need be to enforce quarantine in chosen places.

I am a HCP. If I had DC, I would want to be quarantined at work, to keep my DC safe. Unfortunately I don't. As I live alone, I would want to be quarantined at home.

Flu is not such an unreasonable comparator. In an average year, worldwide flu kills, what, about 250,000 to 500,000 people world wide? Flu is actually pretty scary.

No way are you a nurse.

No nurse, or mother, would willingly "self quarantine" at home when they risk infecting their own children!

I reiterate, if this does become a pandemic and the government chooses to quarantine every staff member exposed to he virus, there will literally be no staff to treat all the sick people. This isn't a workable solution.

I suppose this post shows that anyone can be an idiot.

1. The virus is contagious prior to symptoms.

1. Whilst the mortality rate is ‘only’ 2%, it is transmitted more easily and therefore a greater number of people will succumb more easily and more will therefore die.

So are your partners and children and all the people who live with you and the other nurses also going to be quarantined if you go home? I don’t think I could face the idea of blocking my children at home for two weeks and potentially passing on even only a ‘glorified flu’ to them.

To add to Merryoldgoat's point that the virus in contagious prior to symptoms, you can also develop symptoms within a day or two of being infected - or it may take as long as 14 days. So many unknowns/inconsistencies are what is making the response to this so sweeping.

I'm a nurse. Worked through the H1N1 pandemic. It was terrifying. I was assisting my team in placing young, fit and healthy people on ECMO. These people had no pre-existing health problems. We were in full PPE for 12hrs a day. YABVU. What if your children caught it from you?!

I think the single biggest issue with trusts taking this stance is that health workers who can afford to do so will choose to resign as the situation worsens. Most simply wont be able to afford to leave their child(ren) without a parent due to a compulsory (probably now) month long quarantine. Such a hardline approach will actually leave us drastically short of medical workers very early on in the piece.

Exactly my point @nocoolnamesleft Flu kills tens of thousands of people worldwide each year, yet we're not quarantining staff exposed to flu are we? Similarly lots of other horrible illnesses like norovirus can kill the sick and the frail. Yet we aren't quarantining staff exposed to this either? Much like flu and norovirus, the majority of people exposed to the virus will be ill but recover fairly quickly. It's only really very sick or frail people that are likely to have complications.

The point is that it doesn’t really matter what you think, OP. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it’s a workable solution.

You thankfully can and will be held against your will in this situation for the safety of yourself and others; that’s all there is to it.

Your opinion on the matter is entirely irrelevant.

We had a patient with suspected CoV present on Monday..... the nurses exposed were asked to go home and self isolate until the swabs come back on the original patient, which should be tomorrow. Obviously different Trusts are doing different things.

I reiterate, if this does become a pandemic and the government chooses to quarantine every staff member exposed to he virus, there will literally be no staff to treat all the sick people. This isn't a workable solution

Ok but that’s not the point because we are still at the point of trying to prevent that. Different considerations may apply depending on how the illness ends up spreading.

And if this does become a pandemic, where are we going to keep all the thousands of staff in quarantine?