UNTIL PROVEN SAFE

THE HISTORY OF QUARANTINE

The first quarantine was 650-odd years ago – when in 1377 Dubrovnik shut its doors to travellers from plague-infested areas. This is the starting point for what the Guardian called a ‘brainy but accessible book on the history and future of quarantine’ (whose name, incidentally, is from the Italian quarantena, aka 40 days).

When Covid came along, it was to such precedents that 21st-century governments turned. Reviewing the book in the Wall Street Journal, Roger Ekirch wryly quoted the Center for Disease Control’s Martin Cetron: ‘The truth is, our most urgent modern biologic threats have required us to roll back to our 14th-century tool kit.’

Ekirch thought that though neither of the book’s journalist authors have any track record as historians or scientists their story was made ‘compelling’ through the depth of their research and their perspicacious argument ‘that quarantine, a mighty yet dangerous weapon, must be used “more wisely in the future” ’. After all – with more than 20 per cent of the world’s population having been under some sort of lockdown by April 2020 – the political ramifications of quarantine as a disease prevention tool are considerable. Ekirch noted that quarantine – which presumes you’re infectious until proved otherwise – ‘turns on its head traditional Anglo-saxon law’.

Yet the book ranges further than that, said Jennifer Szalai in the New

York Times, noting that it ranges into considerations of pest control and agricultural blight, space travel and even the storage of nuclear waste; not to mention the abuse of medical quarantine as a tool of political and racial oppression. Hard not to agree with Lord Byron: ‘Adieu, thou damned’st quarantine, / That gave me fever, and the spleen!’