Other countries have had better results putting sick people into isolation instead of sending them home to potentially infect their family.
East Asian countries were way ahead of much of the West in adopting widespread mask-wearing as a means to reduce transmission of the coronavirus. And complaints about the Trump administration’s inability to ramp up testing to the kind of levels successfully used to curb a once-major outbreak in South Korea have been endemic for months.
But there’s something else Asian countries do to control the spread that seems almost unthinkable in the United States: centralized isolation of people who test positive for Covid-19 and their close contacts.
The implementation of these systems varies from country to country, according to local circumstances and preferences. But from China to Hong Kong to Taiwan to Korea, the broad outline is the same: You don’t tell sick people to go home where they can infect their families and roommates; you send them someplace set aside for the purpose. Since some of the people isolated end up being asymptomatic, it’s inconvenient to be forced outside of the home. But for the many people who do get sick, just not sick enough to require intensive care in a hospital setting, it’s convenient to have a safe and well-monitored place to recuperate.
Isolation is the less warm-and-fuzzy side of the “more testing and more contact tracing” mantra. But it does seem to work. Singapore, for example, had coronavirus well contained but didn’t practice centralized quarantining among its population of migrant workers — only to see their dorms become a major outbreak hot spot…
To read the entire article from Vox, click https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21238456/centralized-isolation-coronavirus-hong-kong-korea