Quarantine for H1N1 is a slippery slope

by Lindsey Oyler, Alestle Photographer

A couple of weeks ago, SIUE students were sent an e-mail concerning the H1N1 virus. It was focused on isolating exposed students.  Not only could this affect the one student who received H1N1, but also the entire campus in certain circumstances. Quarantine was on the list of measures that could be enforced upon SIUE in such cases.

To be fair, I’d watched the horror flick “Quarantine” weeks before with a couple of friends. Watching the movie, I was not only shocked by the twisted plot, involving a realistic, sanity-draining disease spreading throughout an apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles, but the fact that these people were left to kill one another off like animals without any outside sympathy.

When I received the e-mail, the excessive details of the movie flashed through my mind. No doubt that the movie was more heavily dramatized than any reality I would face. Right?

The movie stressed iron bars and a sniper rifle defense during such isolation. What would SIUE actually utilize? Would we have state officials on the highways? Would the CDC position themselves at every exit? It seems like it would be silly if any of those things happened, but they’d have to put borders around the disease somehow.

My friends have a tendency to shed negative light on H1N1 when it’s brought up in conversation. They said H1N1 is really not that big of a deal. Regular influenza kills several thousands of people each year. When do we ever notice that?

I hardly ever hear about someone dying of typical flu, and yet the numbers tell us differently. According to the CDC, about 36,000 people die of seasonal flu each year.  If the number is a few thousand higher due to H1N1, I highly doubt I’ll notice much of a difference.

Because of the regularity of flu and other sicknesses, even mentioning quarantine sends a shiver down my spine. H1N1 appears to be a perfectly normal illness to me. Quarantine seems too much of an extreme option to even consider, even if the movie exaggerated the idea. I doubt the government will ever actually need to quarantine SIUE. Doing so would be excessive protection for an empty threat.