Does quarantine work?

by | Coronavirus - COVID-19

Transcript

Quarantine is the only thing that works here at the moment. There’s no treatment; there’s no vaccine. So the process here is to find out the people who’ve got it or who are at risk of getting it, isolating them and finding out the people they’ve been in contact with and isolating them, and trying to ring fence every centre of infection so that it doesn’t spread as far as it could.

And then you could do general things which is not about quarantine, which is about avoiding close social contact, social hygiene if you like and that’s about closing theatres, sporting events and so on so that large numbers of people aren’t coming into contact very closely together. You don’t have bathrooms with thousands of people using them all the time so it’s impossible to keep clean. Those are the sorts of things that make a difference, but that’s all you can do, you won’t stop the epidemic you’ll just slow it down.