IW quarantining

[Tom Mazanec]

Wouldn't a world traveler (jumper or conveyor) have to be quarantined for the rest of his/her life? Otherwise, how could you be sure that he/she was not a carrier of a virus with the mortality and morbidity of smallpox or ebola and the contagious incubation period of HIV?
EDIT: And the infectivity of measles or influenza.

[Kelly Pedersen]

I'd guess the answer is "Because that's no way to run an interworld service". Risk management is always going to be a matter of weighing the danger of something happening against its probability. If an event is sufficiently unlikely, it doesn't make sense to spend huge amounts of resources trying to prevent it. In the case of a super-disease, well, the chance certainly exists, but the planners at Infinity have probably decided that it's low enough, and that worlds infected with it would be obvious enough, that shutting down interworld travel entirely over such a chance isn't worth the cost.

[Gnomasz]

Though someone might want to enforce it and even get supporters for this in the ranks of IW and boom! IW: Civil War.

[(E)]

A simple flu bug from any time line more than about 10 years apart may be fairly nasty.

[ericthered]

And yet that sort of thing isn't considered in IW.

Why?

Because Infinite Worlds has its roots in time cops stories, and the base stories either ignored disease because the controlling organization had medicine that was just that good, or disease was ignored, or the diseases for your destination were well known and you could thus prepare.

Its also worth noting that in last half of the 20th century, it was assumed that technology had beat the snot out of disease and would continue to do so. We're starting to see that confidence wane now, but the source materiel just let protagonists walk all over old man plague.

Not to mention that such a setting would be boring.

[Dargaron]

Going off of ericthered's point:

Any crosstime agency has access to not only their own (presumably advanced) medicinal expertise, but a near-limitless corpus of remedies and treatments from already-explored parallels. A pathogen might have resistance to every trick in the Homeline toolkit: but what about the one where Alexander the Great conquered the world, and medical science went in a completely different direction? Or the one where Elves cultivate a magic flower that cures all (really most) ailments?

As the crosstime agency explores more parallels, the chance of an incurable pathogen decreases dramatically. Any virus/bacteria/whatever that a crosstime agent brings back has to contend with the sum total of human medical knowledge, multiplied several times over. I pity the fool.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

I'd guess the answer is "Because that's no way to run an interworld service". Risk management is always going to be a matter of weighing the danger of something happening against its probability.

More or less. You could equally well say you should never let them return at all, because you never know they aren't carrying the Sun-Extinguishing-Curse, a magical effect that causes any star that illuminates them to instantly go out. Or leave in the first place, since the conveyer jump to a timeline with different physical laws that might allow it to serve as a bridge to let a universe collapsing force to propagate back to its world of origin. In a setting with as much weird stuff as Infinite Worlds you don't *know* those aren't real risks.

It's likely enough anybody making the first trip to a particular world-line does have to observe a quarantine, but the odds of a really hazardous problem that wouldn't show in the traditional 40 days are frankly pretty low.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec

Wouldn't a world traveler (jumper or conveyor) have to be quarantined for the rest of his/her life? Otherwise, how could you be sure that he/she was not a carrier of a virus with the mortality and morbidity of smallpox or ebola and the contagious incubation period of HIV?

HIV indirectly had worse mortality and morbidity than smallpox. It was just less contagious and gave us plenty of time to work on treatments. While in theory a world with an undetectable disease that is horrifically world-destroying on Homeline while innocuous elsewhere is possible, so's getting smacked into oblivion by a gigantic asteroid. For that matter so's running into something nearly as devastating from any traveler coming back from South America, Africa or Asia. Doesn't mean we'll get crazy with the countermeasures.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

HIV indirectly had worse mortality and morbidity than smallpox. It was just less contagious and gave us plenty of time to work on treatments. While in theory a world with an undetectable disease that is horrifically world-destroying on Homeline while innocuous elsewhere is possible, so's getting smacked into oblivion by a gigantic asteroid. For that matter so's running into something nearly as devastating from any traveler coming back from South America, Africa or Asia. Doesn't mean we'll get crazy with the countermeasures.

That said, limited quarantine periods make sense, and they don't have to slow the game down much.

GM: "The PCs have 40 days of quarantine to get through, how do they spend it?"

"Can we study skills?"

"Sure, as long as it's something available in the Infinity libraries and staff.

You could brush past the quarantine in a few minutes of game time, and even use it to give players a chance to heal wounds, catch up ST and HT, work on skills, etc.

[fchase8]

Robots and drones would be the first to explore a world, taking back samples of microscopic life. They would detect for radio signals, and if the world is advanced enough for that, listen in on them - otherwise, a drone could take aerial photos of human (or other) settlement. There would be a lot of off-game pre-exploration of any world.


Playing an initial exploration of a world could use any standard quarantine to lessen the advantage I-Scouts would have on that world. They couldn't just pop back to Homeline to get the perfect gadget for the situation, or call in I-Cop support whenever. If there's some big thing happening, they either have to abandon the world and wait the standard quarantine, or act then & there with what they have.