At the height of the SARS pandemic of 2003, Toronto fell back on one of the world's oldest public health tools: quarantines. City officials identified over 23,000 people who had contact with known or potential Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome patients, asking nurses, paramedics, high school students, and thousands more to confine themselves to restrict the spread of illness — whether they had symptoms or not. Today, as Toronto reacts to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus similar to SARS, no one is quarantined. Two confirmed GTA cases are in voluntary "self-isolation" at home, rather than in hospital. Lessons learned from the SARS crisis have profoundly shaped response to the coronavirus outbreak — including the lesson that rigid and unnecessary restrictions can have serious social, economic and health costs. Yet the Canadian government is planning to enforce a two-week quarantine at a Canadian Forces Base in Trenton for the 211 apparently healthy people being evacuated Friday from the epicentre of the outbreak in Wuhan, China. Quarantine measures are being invoked worldwide, from the United States, Australia and Hong Kong to a pair of cruise ships anchored in Asia, one of which is carrying at least 251 Canadians . Infection control experts… Read full this story
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