Geodog

SARS in Berkeley? No, but how close a call?

The Daily Californian, the student newspaper of the University of California-Berkeley, reported on Friday that:

the student was back in school Thursday after sitting next to a man on a flight from Tokyo who thought he had contracted a deadly virus, ... The student was kept in the plane for two hours, along with the other passengers, after it landed at San Jose International Airport. Several passengers on the American Airlines flight complained of symptoms similar to SARS, but none of them turned out to have the deadly virus.
...
The Center for Disease Control advised the student to put herself into "temporary quarantine" until further notice, Felde said. The student stayed home from school for one day until the Center for Disease Control later reported that none of the passengers were infected with SARS, Felde said.

While I hear Dr. Hughes of the CDC's statement that "if you haven't been to Asia, there is no evidence that you are at risk at all [from SARS], stories like the one above make me wonder how close the margin of error is. California currently has 30 suspected and actual cases of SARS. What if the worse case scenario did take place, and the person on the plane was incubating the disease, and he or she was one of the super-infectors, and passed it on to the student, who then passed it on to her classmates? The school community, with lots of people packed closely together, and with each person interacting with lots of other people, is a classic environment for the rapid spread of infectious diseases, as any parent of a child in daycare rapidly learns. Would we then have to deal with 100 plus cases of SARS in Berkeley, where I live? This scenario is unlikely, and I am sure that public health authorities in the City of Berkeley and at UC Berkeley are keeping a careful eye on things, but it certainly isn't an impossible scenario. The weak link in the current system of epidemiological control is the lack of effective screening of travelers -- as long as that is the case, we are all running some risk, because outbreaks will continue to occur. We can just hope that they are rapidly contained.

Cross posted to The Berkeley Blog and SARSWatch.org