Quarantines don't work.
That's one of several lessons being drawn from this week's TOPOFF 2 anti-terrorism exercise, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
During a mock outbreak of pneumonic plague in Chicago, officials considered setting up a quarantine. But those can be problematic. They can create major panics. And serious moral dillemas.
With quarantines, "you have to decide whether you're going to shoot a grandma in her pickup who's trying to leave the city," Randall Larsen, head of the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, told the Montior.
Instead, the Monitor reports, Chicago authorities "used the media to put out a slogan that aimed to keep people in their homes: 'Stay at home, stay alive.' Officials then decided to mobilize postal workers to deliver medicines to affected neighborhoods."
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