Quarantine nation
As COVID-19 continues its stark spread across the U.S., millions of Americans now find themselves sequestered in their homes, either by choice or by government mandate. Indeed, as of March 25, more than 100 million Americans – a little less than one third of the entire country – have been ordered to stay home. There’s no precedent for this in modern American history.
On this week’s episode, we’re embedding with a handful of people who were exposed to the new coronavirus and are now quarantined. We speak to a college student from Long Island, holed up in his parents’ basement; a group of incarcerated men in California, fearing for their safety in cramped quarters; and an elderly couple whose cruise was cut short. Their stories, though quite different, each gesture at the anxieties rippling across the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Also in the episode: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have recommended that anyone exposed to the coronavirus isolate themselves for 14 days. But as science reporter Elizabeth Shogren explains, emerging research suggests that might not be enough time.
“The World Health Organization and CDC didn’t have much to go on when they set the 14-day quarantine,” Shogren says. “COVID-19 was new. There were hardly any studies of patients who got it. But on March 15th, Chinese and Canadian scientists released a study of more than 2,000 people who got the virus in CHINA. It found that more than 10 percent of them didn’t get symptoms until after 14 days.”
Read Elizabeth’s reporting.
|
