Our experience with the AD unit and the heavier care unit was that
there were frequent quarantines - they tended to happen here more in
the winter - i.e. outbreaks of flu that seem to be a standard feature
of life in the winter months anywhere where you get a cold snowy
winter and everyone is indoors.

Even if visitors are careful, with so many staff and families, service
people etc. in and out (never mind that the AD population aren't
exactly hand washers), its almost inevitable that germs get into their
environment and take right off. You have a population of the most
frail and vunerable elderly who really can't fight off infections, and
wham - everyone gets it and you need to lock the unit down to get
everyone healthy again and keep new germs from getting in or out if
you can.

As you know, I live in Toronto, and living through the SARS outbreak
last year was interesting. People in the modern world are not at all
used to the concept of quarantine - health officials had a HUGE
problem trying to get people to cooperate. People were apoplectic they
couldn't visit their loved ones in locked down hospitals even though
it was apparent that SARS was both deadly and extremely contagious so
it was for their safety as much as anything. People who were supposed
to be quarantined at home didn't always behave. Just to give you an
example, one poor man who ultimately died of SARS was told he had been
exposed and put under home quarantine. He decided to ignore the
direction and go to work - at a company of more than 1500 employees.
He did get SARS, and his entire company was shut down for close to 3
weeks - they had to quarantine everyone just in case he'd managed to
infect anyone in the days he was at work before he had symptoms.
Fortunately, no one caught it from him, but ai, ai, ai!!

Sorry for wandering off topic, but just thinking about the whole idea
of quarantine. We're not used to being told what to do when it comes
to freedom of movement.

Mary G.