Near the famed Pebble Beach golf course, two dozen people exposed to the new coronavirus sit confined to a cluster of unused buildings on a California seafront park.
Hundreds more have been whisked to military bases in California, Georgia and Texas, to count down two weeks of isolation. In San Francisco, a few may soon be housed in recreational vehicles leased by the city. Georgia is using trailers stationed within a state park called Hard Labor Creek.
As President Donald Trump prepares to declare a national emergency to slow the pandemic, health officials across the U.S. are grappling with a problem rarely seen since the days when tuberculosis and polio swept the land: where to put people who have been quarantined.
Any choice can face fierce and immediate blowback.
In the hard-hit Seattle area, officials in the suburb of Kent have gone to court to stop the county from housing patients in a former Econo Lodge motel that it bought, renovated and staffed for $5.5 million. In California, Costa Mesa obtained a court order that led federal officials to drop plans for housing patients there. San Antonio briefly tried to block federal officials from releasing quarantined people from a local Air Force base.
And yet, public health experts say quarantines can make the difference between overwhelming hospitals with a flood of patients or keeping numbers manageable. And those people have to stay somewhere.
“You should try to contain as much of the disease as you can,” said George Rutherford, an epidemiology professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “If you’re talking about an extra 100,000 cases in the ICUs, that’s a lot of ICU beds. Anything that will flatten the curve is good.”
Isolation Drill
Georgia State Representative Dave Belton, whose constituents live in the rural towns near Hard Labor Creek, said people initially were “angry and shocked” when they heard that infected patients would be quarantined in seven trailers there, about an hour east of Atlanta. “People move out here to get away from this kind of thing,” he said.
But when he explained that the quarantine spot was small and far from public areas, that law enforcement would be on duty 24/7 and that trash would be incinerated, they calmed down. “We’re a welcoming community,” he said.
San Francisco’s solution may be the most unusual. The city has leased 30 recreational vehicles, at a cost of $443,000, for homeless people who test positive but don’t require hospitalization.
The virus arrived as San Francisco, with its sky-high rents, was struggling with a surging homeless population estimated at more than 8,000 people. Leaders fear the results if infection starts spreading through shelters or tent encampments. Aware that 30 campers may not be enough, city leaders are also searching for vacant residential properties -- a rarity -- and asking hotels to identify unused rooms.