Quarantine.

I doubt I would be this creative if I were locked in a hospital room for 7 weeks.

Comments

[Christy P.]

Hilarious. I may use it as a moment of zen for the med students today, but sadly, the vocab is wrong. Technically this man is not in quarantine but in isolation. Unless they use the terms differently Down Under. Quarantine is for people who are exposed but not (yet) sick. Isolation is for people who are sick and need to be kept from others. So says the infectious disease epidemiologist.

[bearing]

You are no fun :P The word "quarantine" is demonstrably funnier than the word "isolation."

[Mark]

The vocabulary is not wrong, it just has a different audience. To the common folk, quarantine is any limit of movement designed to stop the spread of disease. It covers both "quarantine" and "isolation" in the technical jargon. This is a bit like weight and mass. In common speech we can say weight to mean both, but to an engineer they are different. Plus, Bearing is right that quarantine is way funnier.