Shameful

Shameful

Travelers are miffed by the new CDC guidelines reducing recommended quarantine for Covid-19 to 7 days, since so many countries continue to require a 14-day quarantine for Americans following their arrival.

Note carefully how other countries in the world interpret this shameful move by the CDC. No other major public health authority in the world has shortened the recommended quarantine period.

“Shortening the quarantine period may be more plausible for Americans, but authorities have acknowledged that the new guidance may miss some infections,” South African Richard Ambrose writes today in Eminetra.

He’s among the most polite. Citizen Digital in Kenya is more to the point:

“Pence has been pushing the CDC for months to review the guidelines. The CDC did not immediately return CNN’s request for comment.”

There are two reasons the CDC is now the lone wolf in the public health world. The first is because the lame duck season is evicerating good science and the crazies left in the government are having their way.

More reasonable but still as shameful is that Americans simply won’t follow rules like the rest of the world.

Reducing the period to seven days, a consortium of Canadian doctors surmised, will probably help America in the short run, because there might then be some Americans who will concede to quarantine for seven days when they wouldn’t consider quarantining for longer.

That group of good experts also pointed out that the new CDC guidelines insist that after seven days the American get tested and receive a negative result before breaking the quarantine.

Noting that’s difficult in America where tests are much less available than elsewhere in the world, Ashleigh Tuite, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, concludes “that’s in place to stop people who have the virus but no symptoms from ending the quarantine period too early.”

But only in America. Canada, like the rest of the adult world, is sticking with its 14-day quarantine recommendation. But for America, the maverick, the childish bully:

“…there’s a lot of different things that could theoretically open up — getting health-care workers back to work, getting kids back to school — a lot of ways where this could ease the burden of potential exposure in society,” Dr. Zain Chagla of McMaster University explained.

Because America doesn’t guarantee minimum salaries for workers laid off because of the pandemic. Because America doesn’t give schools enough money to adequately retool to teach during a pandemic. Because a much larger percentage of Americans are already in poverty than in the rest of the world, and with no social safety net — even for a pandemic — many more could drift into it.

We are seen by the rest of the world as a misbehaving school kid living in a world of fewer advantages, who must be nudged back to goodness by compromised therapies.

The rest of the mature world relies on W.H.O., as we once did. WHO is one of the best international organizations in the world. I’ve relied on it for decades, not just for information about African health, but even for such things as labor statistics.

WHO’s published science and recommendations regarding Covid-19 are unmatched for their integrity and usefulness.

Trump pulled us out because he felt the current head of WHO, an Ethiopian, was too favorable to the Chinese. Hmm. Who controlled the epidemic the best?

There’s no doubt saving some lives is better than not.

But how shameful America has become.

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