Close the borders

The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic in human history, causing the death of about 100 million people. It is estimated to have killed some 50 percent of the european population.

Since we entered the Covid-19 pandemic, focus has turned to the 20th century “Spanish” flu pandemic for answers on how to beat or survive this thing. “Mask or no mask” and “lockdown or no lockdown” being the most common hopes for the world to recover before immunity through vaccination might be achieved.

No one knows where the plague originated, but its first definite appearance was in Crimea in 1347. From Crimea, fleas living on the rats that travelled on Genoese slave ships carried it. But then as now, “climate change” is a culprit. Crop failures due to weather changes, subsequent famine, and an influx of rats from China (China? winkwink). There is a theory that climate conditions affected Europe’s exposure to disease from cooling in the 13th century Little Ice Age after the medieval warming period.

But rats are not necessarily the only bad guys when it came to spreading the plague. They brought it to Europe, but the plague was “pneumonic” (affecting the lungs) as well as “bubonic” (affecting the lymph nodes). Pneumonic plague is spread human-to-human through airborne droplets. Sound familiar?

The British King did this: “The 1349 parliament was postponed. Officials fled to their homes in the country. The people were in lockdown, looked to the king to support them in the crisis.” History repeats.

In 1347 Italy, almost a year before the plague reached England, ports began to turn away ships. Venice was the first city to close its ports and ships were subjected to 30 days, later 40, of isolation before they could dock.

The Italians were on top of the idea of “quarantine,” a word derived from the Italian words quaranta giorni, which mean 40 days.

Two quarantine choices. Keep the sick away from the healthy like Vietnam did last year by completely isolating particular areas. Alternatively, keep the healthy away from the sick. Some Italian citystates prevented strangers from entering their cities. A sanitary cordon—broken on pain of death—was enforced by armed guards along transit routes and at access points to cities. A rigid separation between healthy and infected persons was initially accomplished through makeshift “quarantine” camps.

However, the mortality difference between cities that went into full lockdown and those that did not was similar. But one lesson from the 14th century is clear. From the second half of the 14th-century, quarantine regulations against travelers from infected areas was introduced in city after city in Northern Italy. This was an effective prevention method and eventually became common all over Europe.

The first-known case in England was a seaman who arrived by ship in Dorset, on the southern English Channel coast, in June 1348. By autumn, the plague had reached London. A second wave came when the plague arrived by ship on the east coast of Northern England.

The pandemic reached Bergen in Norway by ship from England in 1349. The disease appeared in the port city of Visby, Sweden by ship from Denmark or Germany. Ships landing from England infected Ireland. By 1347, the plague had reached Egypt, transmitted by ships from Constantinople. Ships from France brought death from western France to Galicia, Spain in the northwest.

The Philippines, as an island nation, needs to learn from those lessons. As difficult, painful, and oppressive as it may be, for the time being we now need to close our borders as much as possible.