All this talk about asymptomatic people carrying a virus without knowing it and infecting others brings to mind the story of … Mary Mallon.
No doubt the more astute medical types will recognize the name, but for the rest of us she was better known as Typhoid Mary.
TL,DR version: In the early 20th century a functionally illiterate Irish woman wound up being a carrier for typhoid fever. Mind you, she seemed pretty healthy and had no reason to think she was sick..but wherever she went and worked as a cook…people got sick and died.
Eventually, in some pioneering medical investigatory process, the NYC health people figured out that Mar was making other people sick. The record is a little unclear if they tried to explain it to her but it isn’t hard to imagine that someone with her lack of education might not grasp the idea of being a carrier. All she knew was that the one marketable skill she had was being taken away from her. So, she nodded her head, said she’d stop cooking, and went right on cooking for more families who mysteriously got sick.
Eventually the health department locked her up, quite against Mary’s will, and she wound up spending the rest of her life on North Brother Island.
If you’d like to read the more detailed version, and follow some of the legal wranglings that locked her up, try this and this.
In a time where many people chafe at the notion of .gov forcing restrictions upon them in the name of the ‘public health’ it’s interesting to see how far some municipalities went.
I read somewhere that she was indignant beyond belief that health officials told her she had to wash her hands before preparing food.
According to one of my profs, when Typhoid Mary was locked up, she became the prison cook. And still refused to wash her hands.
I have Irish heritage, but I better understand, “No Irish need apply.”
“No Irish Need Apply” was common decades before Mary Mallon was born.
Notice THEY didn’t do that to the QUEERS for aids . Just saying ,deadly disease.
True, but the FUNDIES were pretty quick to demand that homosexuals be quarantined like they were in Cuba.
But also, as was believed at the time, there were only two ways to get infected – unprotected sex with an infected man, or sharing drug needles with an infected person. And, as Sam Kinison said, you pretty much have to make an appointment for both of those. So, it was pretty unlikely you were going to infect someone else through everyday activities.
You forgot to mention HIV infection by blood transfusion or blood products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood_products
They could have saved a lot on lives, time, and money, just by paying her not to work, but that would be to simple for any government.
Drunken history on YT has a good one for Typhoid Mary. The main reason for the investigation was rich people were dying and they paid big bucks to get a guy with skills to find out what was going on.
Too bad my formal education did not include drunken history lessons because I would have paid better attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12wh0lfHb2U&t=131s
Polio, that ravaged the country until 1955 never once caused the country to stop and there was hard science to show a transmission rate of 1 to 4 contacts.
American history is full of examples that had hard science to show that isolating everyone indefinitely would have stopped the spread of the disease dujour but it never happened. Now that we have a disease with no hard science to show how to slow or stop it, the political class has decided that we need to hide until they say it is OK to come out. And they are taking our money, full salary, while doing it.
I would rather die today, age 70, from Wu Flu than obey foolish and dangerous edicts from tyrants.
do not tread on me. but, let me tread on you.
Several years ago I served on a offshore sailboat,there was a outbreak of food poisoning,so taking the sanitation knowledge I had earned at a previous job I found the pots and pans were not cleaned properly. After cleaning properly and reporting to Captain and crew there were still crew that did not believe it was safe to eat even after days with noone getting sick. There are still superstitious people even “educated” ones.
The organism that causes typhoid fever (Salmonella enterica) tends to hide in the gall bladder… From there it enters the bowel, and then typhoid is transmitted fecal-orally..
The powers that be offered to remove Mary’s gall bladder, but she refused (as was her right). So, they kept her in lockdown