Understanding what lockdowns actually are is crucial. Media outlets often use the terms lockdown, quarantine, and social distancing interchangeably. But to public health experts they are very different. Scientists use the term “quarantine” to describe confining people exposed to someone else with an infectious disease. Those quarantined people aren’t even necessarily sick, but they might be. The person who actually has the disease is properly said to be not quarantined but “isolated.” A lockdown is a broader response, perhaps more accurately described as a “mass quarantine,” covering a
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