Quarantine involves restricting movement or segregating well persons who have been exposed to a contagious disease before it is known whether they will become ill. The objective is to reduce transmission by preventing people from contacting those who have not yet become ill and potentially becoming infected themselves (and also to prevent them from passing on infection to others). The duration of quarantine is usually determined based on the expected length of time required for asymptomatic incubation of the pathogen.
Implementing quarantine can be difficult. It requires effective contact tracing, a clear understanding of the threat among public health staff, and support from law enforcement and transportation authorities. It requires a willingness to detain people who refuse to comply with quarantine orders, and the ability to provide essential supplies and care for those restricted to quarantine while respecting their human rights and civil liberties. It also requires the ability to rapidly identify those who are asymptomatic and able to be released without risk to others, and to provide them with a reasonable amount of time to make arrangements for travel home.
This review found that the evidence on the effectiveness of quarantine is limited. Efforts to improve the quality of future research on the impact of quarantine on outcomes such as adherence and secondary harms are needed, particularly because many of the existing studies have a cross-sectional design, limited sample size, or were conducted months after implementation. Further work on real-time modeling of the impact of quarantine in actual outbreaks or epidemics is also needed to enable better decision making in response to the threats posed by infectious diseases.
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