Dartmouth Employee Suspected of Having Coronavirus Allegedly Attended Mixer With Students
“went to a mixer at a crowded music venue”
The school claims this employee was told to go home and stay there.
MSN reports:
Told to Stay Home, Suspected Coronavirus Patient Attended Event With Dartmouth Students
When an employee of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire showed signs of possible coronavirus last week, a medical worker who had examined him told him to avoid contact with others, pending further tests. Instead, he went to a mixer at a crowded music venue.
Three days later, he was confirmed as the state’s first coronavirus case.
And now a second case has been confirmed — a “close contact” of the patient’s — raising new questions about what should happen when suspected coronavirus patients ignore requests to self-quarantine.
The man, who had come down with flu-like symptoms after a trip to Italy, has now been officially ordered by New Hampshire’s health commissioner to isolate himself at home.
“The individual is complying now,” said Jake Leon, communications director for the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.
News that a health care worker could have exposed students at the event last Friday night, a mixer for doctors and Dartmouth College students, swiftly reverberated on the nearby campus.
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Comments
Given that action like this conceivably could end up in the death of many others, why not treat this like criminal transmission of HIV?
Because he was under no legal obligation to obey the request, he had no positive knowledge that he was infected, he had no intention of infecting anyone at this event, and so far at least there is no evidence that he did so.
You’d think an employee of a medical school would be intelligent enough to stay home. I’m sure the school would have even accommodated a request to work from home for a week or two.
I was chatting with a former Hopkins co-worker about this last week. We were there when HIV was killing 1200 people a week just here in the US in the mid 90’s. The medical-politics back then were fascinating. On one hand there was a faction who were demanding way more money and effort from the medical community, and at the same time another faction was completely opposed to any acknowledgement of scientific findings or publicity lest it backfire and lead to enforced isolation and quarantine. AIDS was quite literally the first political disease where policy ran roughshod over science and statistics. God forbid anyone express a lick of common sense when discussing it, and we see that shift now when we look at any attempt to use statistics to profile from policing to TSA screening. Equal-opportunity never is. It is a situation where treatment application proved to be far worse than the disease. I point that out to the Red Cross every time they waste an hour of my life doing a pre-donation screening. I seriously wonder if they think that I own a time-machine which allows me to go back and change things that I did before 1976 from the last time I donated blood. So call me just a bit skeptical when reading about corona virus. I do like the fact that the rumor that it is caused by corona beer has reputedly lead to a 30% drop in their sales.
No, it hasn’t.
I hope the employee who violated the “no contact” order dies a slow and painful death.
There was no order. Now that he does have an order, he’s obeying it.