Vaccines not key – COVID proves quarantining is the most effective way of containing spread.

The term “quarantine” originally refers to self-quarantine or quarantine of selective individuals who are suspected to be carriers of the infection, however, a new term mass quarantine” is emerging nowadays, which primarily refers to the enforced quarantine of a population by the government to prevent the spread of a disease outbreak.[13] A major purpose of mass quarantine is to flatten the curve of the spread of the disease. The curve in this scenario refers to the projected number of people that will be infected by COVID-19 over a period of time. The curve takes on different shapes, depending upon the rate of spread. A steep curve indicates the exponential spread of the disease in a shorter time. A steep rise will lead to the overloading of the health care system (as it was seen with Italy recently during the COVID- 19 outbreak). This is particularly of more importance in countries with a high density of population and limited health care facilities like in India. However, a steep curve has a steep rise as well as steep fall, which means after the infection has affected as many people as it can the case numbers will drop at a faster rate as well.[13,14] So flatening the curve primarily means to slow down the rate of infection.[14] It means the same number of people will get affected but over a longer period of time, which leads to lesser stress on the health care system, and in this case, may also provide us time to search for definitive therapeutic modalities like an antiviral drug or a vaccine. The mass quarantine strategies used by countries like Italy and India are aimed to flatten the curve of COVID- 19 infections in these countries. As far as WHO is concerned, in the past, it has not recommended broad quarantine measures in general. However, recently in the report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on controlling the spread of COVID, China's efforts have been praised, which include measures like enforced travel restrictions on an enormous scale and mass quarantine.[15] Willem Roper in his online report has mentioned how effectively China was able to drop down the daily admission rate of COVID patients from more than 1600 per day to less than 8 per day in less than a span of 1 month.[16] Many authors in the past, especially after the SARS outbreak in 2006, have published articles recommending the use of aggressive quarantine strategies for controlling the spread of rapidly emerging infectious diseases.[17,18,19]