Deconstructing Pandora's Quarantine

The myth of Pandora seems to me a useful metaphor for understanding the kinds of issues I hope to discuss on this blog. My current experience with quarantine is a good first exercise. Using the Pandora's Box story as a guide, I will try to name the evil spirits of a given situation and identify the hope that can reconcile them. Why not just call them plusses and minuses? I guess that just doesn't seem as interesting to me.

Quarantine

Evil

• Endangered Individual Liberties
• Lost Productivity
• Economic Hardship

Hope

• Public Safety
• Time to Recover from Illness
• Increased Personal Time

In reality, this demarcation is oversimplified. If one is genuinely infected with a dangerous disease, most people would agree that public safety and the need to recover from the illness would trump any of the negatives of quarantine. What I would really need to do is categorize my thoughts not for quarantine in general, but for quarantine in the context of an otherwise healthy and functioning individual experiencing one nuisance sign of a potentially dangerous disease that surfaced in a rare outbreak that had a few cases in a state where he recently traveled.