used to successfully reduce transmission of the disease. During the 2003 SARS outbreak in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, large-scale quarantine was imposed on travelers arriving from other SARS areas, work and school contacts of suspected cases, and, in a few instances, entire apartment complexes where high attack rates of SARS were occurring. In China, entire villages in rural areas were quarantined and no travel was allowed in or out of the villages. One village in Hebei province was quarantined from 12 April 2003 until 13 May. Tens of thousands of individuals fled from areas when they learned of an impending cordon sanitaire, thereby possibly spreading the epidemic. In August 2014, a cordon sanitaire was established around some of the most affected areas of the Western African Ebola virus epidemic. On 19 August 2014, the Liberian government quarantined the entirety of the district of West Point of the capital, Monrovia, and issued a statewide curfew. The cordon sanitaire of the West Point area was lifted on 30 August. The information minister, Lewis Brown, said that this step was taken to ease efforts to screen, test, and treat residents. In January 2020, a cordon sanitaire was drawn around the Chinese city of Wuhan, known as the Wuhan lockdown, due to what became the COVID-19 pandemic. As the outbreak expanded, travel restrictions impacted over half of the Chinese population, creating what may be the largest cordon sanitaire in history until this was surpassed by the lockdown in India, affecting the entire 1.3 billion population, in March 2020. By April 2020, half of the world's population was under some form of lockdown in more than 90 countries in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the 2020–2021 Malaysian movement control order and a nationwide lockdown in Italy. Ethical considerations Guidance on when and how human rights can be restricted to prevent the spread of infectious disease is found in the Siracusa Principles, a non-binding document developed by the Siracusa International Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights and adopted by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 1984. The Siracusa Principles state that restrictions on human rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights must meet standards of legality, evidence-based necessity, proportionality, and gradualism, noting that public health can be used as grounds for limiting certain rights if the state needs to take measures "aimed at preventing disease