These islands of Sars

The dilemma, actually, is much larger than simply tempting possible virus-carriers into voluntary quarantine without scaring them off with threats of punitive action. It is this: what exactly are the rights of otherwise healthy people — everyday people with offices to attend, weddings to celebrate, errands to run, taxis to drive, cricket games to play, daily wages to earn, movies to watch, examinations to cram for? As a deadly new pneumonia strikes terror in our midst, what are legitimate grounds for preventive detention? As the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus finds residency (hopefully transient) in certain places, what are acceptable justifications for geographical isolation?

In times when travel advisories are often instruments of coercive diplomacy, when the airport is a site where each traveller is considered guilty before being proven innocent, health precautions have tailed in rather neatly with established security procedures. Cautions against travel to farflung corners of the world may be routine, but they always invite howls of protest about bias, about insensitivity to local sentiment and business. So it is with the WHO’s advisory against non-essential travel to Canada’s largest city, Toronto. Already, residents are compiling their city’s ills: hospitality and other businesses are down, the Canadian dollar is depreciating, Chinese restaurants lie empty. All because of the UN organisation’s intervention — and, they say, all at a time when Toronto has the Sars threat firmly under control. (Singaporeans would probably share the sentiment, but try telling that to obdurate Air India pilots refusing to fly to Southeast Asia!)

As for electronic temperature readings at emigration and immigration checks, well, that’s nothing compared to intensive scrutiny of even our shoes.

Really, are we entitled to demand that some of us be temporarily exiled from our lives — that some regions be disconnected from global business and travel — so that the rest of us can go about our daily routine unthreatened by this infection with no known cure? In a recent essay, Abraham Verghese, Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas, makes a case for draconian measures. Acknowledging that historically quarantines have often been expressions of anti-immigrant biases, that quarantines jostle uneasily against accepted notions of liberty and free will, he argues that the alternative is worse: exposing large swathes of the population to the virus and death.

Certainly, isolation remains the only way at the moment to beat the Sars virus. According to early estimates, its mortality rate is around 5 per cent — far higher than that during the 1918 flu epidemic that left more than 20 million dead — and the infection rate alarmingly high. In the absence of any cure, the only option is to starve the virus of carriers, something which can only be accomplished through quarantines. But as Sars threatens to inch its way through India, let’s remember one thing. That those segregated are putting their lives on hold, so the rest of us can carry on reassured.