What If Self Isolation Lasted Decades? | Unveiled

What if Self-Isolation Lasted Decades?

Humans are social creatures; we don’t like to be alone and some of our best inventions involve bringing people together across huge distances. The human desire to be social is so strong that solitary confinement is considered by the United Nations to be a “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. But if being alone is suddenly in everybody’s best interest, how well will we cope?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if self-isolation lasted decades?

In the face of the 2020 global pandemic, people around the world have had to practice social distancing and self-isolation. Social distancing refers to limiting contact with others to a safe distance; while self-isolation involves staying at home, without venturing outside, due to symptoms of or possible exposure to the virus.

Historically, quarantines have been practiced in various and often much more unpleasant ways. Though keeping sick people away from healthy people has long been understood to stop the spread of disease, quarantines as we know them date back to the 14th century when the Black Death ravaged the world. “Quarantine” comes from the Venetian word “quarantena”, which literally means “40 days”. That was how long ships were left in Venice’s harbor before they were allowed to dock, in an attempt to stop the plague from spreading. After the 14th century Black Death outbreak, Europe continued to have sporadic plague outbreaks, and in the 18th century the Venetian Public Health Office began quarantining plague-infected ships on Poveglia Island. Sick people were confined to the island, many of them dying due to the plague’s high mortality rate and lack of medicine. To this day the island remains uninhabited.

The traditional 40 day quarantine is a LOT compared to the two weeks of isolation WHO recommends to stop the pandemic. But much longer periods of isolation have occurred throughout history: specifically, sieges. One of the longest was the Siege of Candia in Crete, which was besieged by the Ottoman Empire from 1648 to 1669 – twenty-one years! During such long periods of isolation, the people on either side of the walls could at least interact with their own; but sieges were still brutal on both sides - the people inside and the armies waiting outside. Both could be hit by food shortages and disease outbreaks, as well as civil unrest from people who desperately wanted the ordeal to be over. Of course, they were even more dangerous for the people inside; catching an infectious disease, even one like the bubonic plague, isn’t a guaranteed death sentence, while leaving your city would almost certainly result in death at the hands of enemy forces.

Fortunately, it’s unlikely that disease outbreaks today could ever be as severe as in the Middle Ages. Even the much-feared Black Death, which is still endemic in some parts of the world, is easily treatable with antibiotics. These days, many people under quarantine are more at risk of loneliness than of getting sick, and the effects of long-term social distancing and self-isolation are under investigation. In 2020, The Lancet published a “rapid review” of the psychological impact of long-term quarantine ahead of the world going into lockdown, looking at how different stressors might affect people in isolation. Even if you’re safe and comfortable in your own home, factors like boredom, anger, running low on supplies, financial stress, and fear of catching the disease, can all take a significant toll on a person’s ability to function. Many organizations, including the CDC, have published guidelines advising people on how to stay sane during self-isolation.

This is in the face of a mass quarantine that might last from anywhere between three months and one year. In the case of a decades-long lockdown, all these problems persist, but with far more severity. Even with phones and the internet to keep us all connected, 20 years of quarantine could have a serious impact on the world’s collective mental health. With health services already struggling to help the sick, it would be impossible to properly address mental health issues until the quarantine was lifted - at which point the damage would already have been done. Demand for mental health services would increase exponentially around the world, and the more authoritarian a quarantine is, the more this would be a problem. Isolation has been found to be much less traumatic to a person if it’s voluntary, for instance, but with militaries and police gaining the power to force people to stay inside – even if this is ultimately in our best interest – we’re coming dangerously close to human rights violations. It’s a balancing act between ensuring people stay inside where they’re safe and going too far towards a military-enforced shutdown.

This debate around how far the authorities need to go to impose a mass quarantine has raged since the famous case of Mary Mallon, or Typhoid Mary. Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid who worked as a cook in New York in the 1900s. Because she handled a lot of food, she spread typhoid with her wherever she went and was forced into quarantine. After she was released, she continued to work as a cook, resulting in another outbreak; she was forcibly quarantined again and remained in isolation until she died over two decades later. At least 3 deaths have been attributed to her and potentially as many as 50.

If people were quarantined for decades, an entire generation would be born and raised indoors and in fear - not knowing what life was like before the lockdown. The impact is uncertain but could be devastating. When the quarantine was lifted, how well would this generation be able to adjust to a world where they no longer had to live in fear? And how educated would they be, since many would be adults by the time the quarantine ended? Schools need to close to contain the spread of disease, and while parents are trying their best to keep their kids learning, with technology helping to bridge that gap, would it be as effective as growing up in an actual school? Would people cling to the isolation even when it’s over simply because it’s familiar and fear of disease still lingers?

There may, however, be some good that could come out of decades of quarantine too. Universal Basic Income is a policy that’s consistently been criticized as extreme, but is now being implemented in various forms to rescue the economy and keep people afloat during the 2020 pandemic. In April 2020, Spain announced that as part of a measure to control the pandemic, it would be implementing a UBI. And there have been calls to do this even in the US, with a policy of a one-time $1,200 payment to any American earning under $75,000. To avert a complete economic meltdown, this would be an absolute necessity in a 20-year-long quarantine that would put millions of people out of work. Health services and welfare states the world over would also need their funding dramatically increased to cope not only with the disease outbreak, but with the aftermath and subsequent mental health problems.

There’s also the fact that with non-essential businesses and factories closed down, the amount of pollution has been reduced with less fossil fuels being burned. A lengthy quarantine may be what’s required to stop major polluters and significantly reduce emissions, perhaps even reversing global warming.

Quarantine might flatten the curve of a deadly disease, but we’d have to be careful to look after ourselves and each other to stay mentally healthy and keep society running. And that’s what would happen if self-isolation lasted decades.