Unbelievable. Imagine being fired upon as you are trying to walk out. I have one question: were these health workers black?
It reminds me of Daniel DeFoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year 1666" when the people trying to escape the plague were murdered by the outlying villagers who feared the disease.
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Update a day later: 3 laboratory rats with the bubonic plague have escaped from their cage in Newark, New Jersey.