Author: James Liang, HUANG Wen – zheng

Despite the tendency of the epidemic to stabilize, under the thick atmosphere of panic, the entire society is still paying a huge price, including various (not patients or people who have close contact with patients) various travel isolation measures. At present, local governments in many provinces and cities all implement a 14-day quarantine policy for migrants. (For example, Inner Mongolia requires all returnees to be quarantined for 14 days.) . In addition, some regions will increase the isolation policy layer by layer. For example, in Shanghai, the government level requirement is that the key areas (such as Hubei) People coming to Shanghai should be isolated for 14 days and not go out, but when it is implemented at the grassroots level Many communities still require that as long as they are returning from overseas or even abroad, they need to be isolated at home for 14 days. The consequence is that local residents are now afraid to travel, for fear that once they have been quarantined for 14 days in the two places, it is tantamount to being unable to go out for activities throughout the month.

These are the regulations from the government or each district. The basic logic is that the outbreak at the origin of the migrant population is greater than the outbreak at the destination. Therefore, the risk of infection of the migrant population relative to the local population is higher. Isolate risks in a day-to-day manner. But the logical question is, is the risk of infection from migrants really higher? In other words, is the epidemic in other places really worse than in the local area? If this is used as a premise, at least all foreign populations should not be targeted across the board, but areas with relatively mild epidemics can be excluded. For example, Wenzhou has no reason to isolate a passenger from Shanghai.

Is there no need to quarantine for as long as 14 days. Because the purpose of quarantine to the outside population is not to pursue the ultimate zero risk, but to require a certain population to have a lower risk of infection than the local average. According to the preliminary statistical analysis of the incubation period, the majority of infected people can be ruled out after about 7 days of isolation. Therefore, it only takes about half of the existing isolation time to reduce the risk of a certain migrant population to a fraction of the original, reducing the cost by at least half.

So, as a less epidemic area, is it necessary to isolate a visitor from a relatively severe epidemic area, such as Wenzhou, Zhejiang? Even just 7 days? This logic may be established only from the perspective of Shanghai, but if the whole country or Shanghai plus Wenzhou’s integrationThe body angle does not hold. Even if there is no travel isolation, if Shanghai and Wenzhou have similar epidemic control measures, a Wenzhou person’s lifestyle will not change much in Shanghai or Wenzhou. So whether he is in Shanghai or Wenzhou, the overall risk of infection in the two places will not change. There may be a slight increase in the risk of infection in Shanghai (because there may be a potential source of infection) , but the risk of infection in Wenzhou will slightly decrease class = “text-remarks” label = “Remarks”> (Because there is one potential source of infection) . From a national perspective, the overall risk has not increased significantly. Therefore, the current travel isolation policy adopted by various places is more like a zero-sum game of drumming and passing flowers. Everyone wants to push the flowers to the next family. It does not help the country’s overall epidemic prevention, but it costs the Chinese economy a huge price.

Some people may ask, is it not necessary to take quarantine measures for migrants from Wuhan? It needs to be clear here that we are opposed to indiscriminate travel isolation, not to isolate high-risk groups. High-risk groups include patients, people who have had close contact with patients, and people from areas where the outbreak is high. However, the reason for their isolation is because they belong to high-risk groups themselves, not because they have moved areas. To put it simply, whether they stay in Wuhan or come to Shanghai, they should be isolated. Wuhan is actually in a semi-segregated state and basically stopped all public activities. In this case, it is reasonable for other regions to adopt the same level of isolation measures for people from Wuhan. Then it is logical that other regions can logically implement the same measures for Wuhan people. As for the objection of this article, just because someone moves the area, he adopts a travel isolation policy that is stricter than the place of departure and the residents of the place of arrival.

Maybe someone will still worry about this-who can guarantee that this person has not been to Wuhan? In fact, we wrote a few days ago suggesting that it is entirely possible to use mobile Internet technology to verify whether a person has been to Wuhan or other severely infected areas. If you have not been to these areas, there is no need for isolation. If you have been there, you can take quarantine measures. However, we must emphasize that the logic of this isolation is aimed at this experience that may increase the risk of infection, not the hometown of the personnel themselves.

Some people will say that if a person has traveled, they will take a plane or train and appear in public places such as airports and train stations, so they will become high-risk groups and they must be isolated. In fact, this is equivalent to treating all transportation and public places as infected areas. Obviously,Belong to excessive panic. Airplanes and trains are only means of transportation. Are their contagion risks higher than in other public places, or a conclusion that can only be reached after scientific analysis of previous data. At least for now, the World Health Organization has not recommended travel restrictions. It is impossible for us to shut down public places across the country, or to isolate all people who have visited public places. Under this premise, the logic of requiring isolation if we have only flown by plane or train may not make sense. So what if there are Wuhan people on the plane? In fact, it is still the original logic. If all Wuhan people are considered to be high-risk infected people, then a policy can be introduced that prohibits high-risk people from using public places or taking planes and trains, instead of isolating all passengers on planes and trains.

Even if you really consider transportation as a higher-risk area in other public places, you should consider it from the perspective of infection risk, and formulate different policies based on different transportation, instead of putting all passengers at high risk. label. For example, the risk of infection by private cars is very low. As for airplanes and high-speed rail, if effective protection measures are taken, the risks are relatively controllable. If you have to isolate those who have been in the plane for 14 days, it will increase the cost of using all planes many times, which will paralyze the entire aviation industry. Compared with this worst result, a more feasible measure is to stipulate that the plane’s occupancy rate cannot exceed 50% during this time, so that sufficient space can be maintained between seats, coupled with the need to wear masks and high frequency disinfection Such measures can reduce the risk of riding these vehicles to levels similar to other public places, and it is not necessary to adopt a 14-day forced quarantine for this purpose.

These recommendations are made because society as a whole is paying a high price for this ineffective travel isolation policy. For example, everyone knows that there is a huge gap in masks across the country, and all regions want to quickly increase production capacity to increase supply. However, both the mask industry and the upstream and downstream industries are currently faced with a serious shortage of work because many workers have just returned after the Spring Festival. The policy of compulsory isolation for 14 days means that the labor gap cannot be filled for at least two weeks. . Similarly, there are a series of enterprises that urgently need to produce the current critical materials. For traditional manufacturing where it is difficult to implement “home office”, isolation policy is currently the biggest obstacle to the restoration of production capacity.

In the context of the isolation policy being overused, migrant workers were unable to arrive at work, various travel exhibitions were forced to stop, most of the national flights were cancelled, the hotel industry was in a stagnation state, and the total direct loss of the entire travel-related industry It is estimated to reach about 10% of the national GDP. In addition, poor internal communication will cause various indirect and joint losses, and even a bad atmosphere of regional discrimination and xenophobia that has not been seen for years. To make matters worse, some countries have followed the Chinese passenger isolation policy and banned Chinese guests across the board.This has severely affected China ’s foreign exchanges and made China face major risks of decoupling from the world.

To sum up, we have paid too high a price for various invalid passenger isolation measures. Of course, the motivation of local governments to introduce quarantine policies to reduce the risk of local epidemics is not incomprehensible. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, the central government still needs to proceed from the overall interests, based on scientific calculations and rational analysis, to prohibit or at least improve the ineffective isolation measures for general passengers.