Isolate
Persons suspected of having an infectious disease, must be isolated
locally where they are found, and contact with uninfected individuals
must be prevented. Isolation involves the transfer of patients to other
designated treatment sites or directly into isolation.
Health care workers must consider whether necessary isolation
precautions should be implemented when evaluating patients. At the same
time, they must decide whether isolation, quarantine, or surveillance is
most appropriate. Isolation refers to the separation of symptomatic
infected persons (patients) from uninfected persons to prevent the
spread of disease. Quarantine refers to the separation of individuals
who are not infected, but who were or may have been exposed to an
infectious disease or pathogen, from individuals who were not exposed or
are more susceptible to infection (Brooks et al., 2020). Surveillance is
a population-based measure used to observe people who are likely to have
been exposed to a disease, but have no symptoms. Surveillance, which is
similar to quarantine but may allow the individual to be isolated at
home, was used during the assessment of MERS infections (Koenig,
Shastry, & Burns, 2017). When observing patients during quarantine, the
individual should be transferred into isolation when symptoms occur and
infection is confirmed.
Diseases for which quarantine is suitable must pose a serious threat to
public health, such as cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, plague,
smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fever, and SARS (Koenig,
2012). Quarantine stations located at entry ports and national borders
provide isolation as part of the national quarantine system to limit the
introduction and spread of infectious diseases in a country. The
duration of the quarantine is determined by the incubation period of the
infection. At present, SARS-Cov-2
infected patients with symptoms of COVID-19 are the main sources of
infection, but asymptomatic infected patients (no symptoms of COVID-19)
may also be infectious (Xu et al., 2020). Therefore, the combination of
quarantine and isolation is effective for the prevention and control
of COVID-19, and this method has
achieved good results in China
(Figure 1).