Of course, reducing the frequency of contact with other people in general is good. I don’t think anyone is arguing against that. What I’m saying is that quarantine can cause more novel contacts.
Statistically speaking there is a good chance no-one at your work place has the virus yet. We are still counting infections in the hundreds or the thousands in populations of millions. If all you do is to spend time at home and at work, there are good odds you’re just switching between two disease free spheres. You can’t get sick without meeting sick people. The only thing that will change that steady state is contact with new people (by yourself or your coworkers/family).
The point the government was making in this case, I believe, is that quarantine can in fact cause more novel connections, faster, and perversely increase the velocity of the spread. The people who are at home will not just sit there. They will meet other people and those people may be from outside of their ordinary, currently disease free social sphere. Thus new vectors of infection spread are introduced that would not have existed without the quarantine.
A quarantine can certainly help down the road, it’s a numbers game. But right now they’re doing the math and think it would be a net negative.
Again, not right. New people are not necessary at all. People are not in little bubbles with no communications between them. If there's even one person in common between two groups, then infection can/will in time cross between.
An infection travels like a game of 'telephone' passed from one to the next, right across the world.
Quarantine will initially regroup people, but in much smaller groups. If the disease is not yet widespread, then your new cohort will also likely be disease-free. There may be a tiny spike as an infected person in a large group joins a different, small group. But this is a good thing, since that group is smaller, and fewer people will now be at risk.
That does not contradict anything the government said. All else being equal, of course smaller groups, in the sense of people seeing fewer other people, is better. That’s not the argument. Nobody is saying “we should see more people”.
All else is not equal. You pull the quarantine lever, you increase social distancing but you also increase local mixing. Costs and benefits. The right choice at any given time depends on the disease spread. Computer modelling and simulation tells us when there is a net benefit.
Statistically speaking there is a good chance no-one at your work place has the virus yet. We are still counting infections in the hundreds or the thousands in populations of millions. If all you do is to spend time at home and at work, there are good odds you’re just switching between two disease free spheres. You can’t get sick without meeting sick people. The only thing that will change that steady state is contact with new people (by yourself or your coworkers/family).
The point the government was making in this case, I believe, is that quarantine can in fact cause more novel connections, faster, and perversely increase the velocity of the spread. The people who are at home will not just sit there. They will meet other people and those people may be from outside of their ordinary, currently disease free social sphere. Thus new vectors of infection spread are introduced that would not have existed without the quarantine.
A quarantine can certainly help down the road, it’s a numbers game. But right now they’re doing the math and think it would be a net negative.