Chronicles of the Virus Day 40. Quarantines Old and New.

It's been forty days. So, when in the Bible we read about forty days and nights in the desert, this is what it feels like. 

Here, we have a saying, "non te quites o sayo ata o corenta de maio." (Don't take off your undershirt until the fortieth of May.) Actually, the sayo was a long undergarment used before the twentieth century, but always in the winter. 

There's also forty days between Easter and the Ascension. And forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter. Rain fell for forty days and forty nights in Noah's time. And the word quarantine comes from the Italian for forty, quaranta. It came about because during plague times, ships were not allowed to disembark people nor cargo during forty days, just in case they were carrying the plague. 

There's an article from the BBC that describes how Ragusa, along with Venice, were the first cities in Europe to implement quarantines during the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Now, the lazareti, the quarantine houses of Dubrovnik (Ragusa in bygone years), can be visited, though not until Croatia (and the world) lifts this modern quarantine. 

The old city leaders, however, knew that infection is worse in crowded places, and the lazareti were large and spacious, with access to the open air. Now, there are many people stuck in small houses with poor ventilation. And that's probably another reason why Covid-19 tends to hit poorer areas in different parts of the globe, much more than suburbs with larger homes and gardens. It's not the same when someone who works in a hospital or a supermarket, comes home to a small, crowded apartment, or to a larger house with a separate entrance or garage area. 

In this day and age, what is happening now seems straight out of a dystopian novel. But pandemics and epidemics were a normal occurence until about a hundred years ago, when medicine gained knowledge, and hygiene became commonplace. New York City is no stranger to large numbers of deaths from epidemics. In 1795, it suffered the begining of the worst epidemic of yellow fever in American history, which didn't entirely remit until quite a few years into the nineteenth century. This epidemic was the beginning of the hospital of Bellevue, which was opened to quarantine sailors who might have had the fever. In the summer of 1798, it grew so bad, that coffins were carried in carts and sold from street to street at four dollars. Many couldn't afford them, and the bodies were dumped in the Potter's Field, today's Washington Square. Over two thousand people died from that epidemic in New York City alone. 

So, this is a simple pimple in human history, just like all the other pimples we've had before. Humans are prone to pimples. 

It seems humor is slowly disappearing, and resignation is starting to set in. I couldn't find any videos or stories about strange happenings in quarantine today. It seems that, after forty days, quarantine is now the new normal. So, I'll leave this story here from January about a pig and her two piglets that ran away from home to a supermarket, where they promptly knocked over a couple bottles of cognac and started drinking. Normal news for normal times.

Life continues.