I'm sometimes slightly radioactive for medical reasons. Most people will be fine with a certain dosis, but little kids and pregnant people (well, their foetus) won't. So they tell you to stay away from people because you don't know who's pregnant. Maybe that contributes.

I kinda wonder if it was a "Tell her to keep her arm raised until tomorrow, it'll teach her to be more careful next time." situation.

Oh, I forgot to mention that my story was happening in Moscow. Radiation safety rules there are... unusual. You get slapped for handling a thorium chunk in an explicitly hot environmental lab outside of fume hood, then dump ion exchange resin flush down the drain. You get strict access control in Kurchatov institute with weeks prior to entry to submit documents just to get to a meeting room, but then the same area has radioactive waste dumped between the trees in forested area (yes, it's in center of the city with many times more people than my whole country).

And then it's regular ALARA. For that girl, that is, screw them those bystanders on the train. Clearly the fancy hospital with all that gear was one of those damned places where government and oligarchs get patched up and regular people are only experimental test samples, and they made no secret out of that.

I once spent several hours stuck in decon on a reactor shutdown because I had breathed in .... Its been thrity years... I think boron gas from the reactor. It had a short half life measured in seconds but I got enough dose that it took a while for it to drop down low enough for me to be passed by the machine. Nothing to do in decon but stand around. No restrooms, food or water. No chairs either. It could have been worse. One guy got a hot particle on them. A microscopic piece of fuel rod. It finally ended up his nethers and they used duct tape pull it off. Hair and all. He left in a set of scrubs with his boots and everything else taken.