Table 1.

Non-pharmaceutical public health interventions to control infectious disease outbreaks, adapted from Cetron and Simone⁵

	Definition	Objective	Setting	Challenges	Remarks
Isolation	Separation of ill persons with contagious diseases from non-infected persons	To interrupt transmission to non-infected persons	Effective for infectious diseases with high person-to-person transmission where peak transmission occurs when patients have symptoms	Early case detection is paramount	Largely ineffective for infectious diseases where asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic infections contribute to transmission
Quarantine	Restriction of persons who are presumed to have been exposed to a contagious disease but are not ill, either because they did not become infected or because they are still in the incubation period	To reduce potential transmission from exposed persons before symptoms occur	Quarantining is most successful in settings where detection of cases is prompt, contacts can be traced within a short time frame with prompt issuance of quarantine	Quarantined persons will need psychological support, food and water, and household and medical supplies	Financial compensation for work days lost should be consideredVoluntary is preferred over mandatory quarantine, but law enforcement may need to be considered if quarantine violations occur frequently
Community containment	Intervention applied to an entire community, city or region, designed to reduce personal interactions and movements. Such interventions range from social distancing among (such as cancellation of public gatherings, school closures; working from home) to community-use of face masks to locking down entire cities or areas (cordon sanitaire)	To reduce intermixing of unidentified infected persons with non-infected community members.	Social distancing is particularly useful in settings where community transmission is substantial	Ethical principles and codes are needed to guide community containment practice and policyCommunity containment to protect the population’s health potentially conflicts with individual rights of liberty and self-determination	Law enforcement is needed in most settings. Therefore such restrictive interventions should be limited to the actual level of risk to the community