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Comment by JacobiX | Hacker News Reader

It should be noted that social distancing is an ancient practice even before 1500. For example before 1400 years back, the Persian Islamic scholar Muhammad al-Bukhari recorded the following 7th-century hadith : “If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place.”

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Quarantine is nothing new. The medieval trading republic of Ragusa had an island in their harbor specifically for quarantining new arrivals. It’s a shame that people even contest the logic today when wholly uneducated people were fine with it hundreds of years ago.

There is a difference between "Quarantine when you cross a border" and "Shut down all commerce and tell people they can't leave their homes for months on end"

There's a difference between the death rates in those plagues and this pandemic, too. There's a difference in the amount of information we have compared to Ragusa. There's a difference between how globally connected the world was then. There's a difference in the technology we have now that allows us to continue to facilitate some sort of economy from our homes.

conclusion: this is a very contrived comparison

Indeed lockdown and quarantine are different things. The countries that have had proper quarantine eg Vietnam, NZ, Thailand have mostly done rather better with covid than those who have not eg. the UK and USA.

Quarantine when you cross a border requires a meaningful border.

Had governments actually shut down all commerce and told people they can't leave their homes, this would have been over in a month.

True. But I mention this to my fellow Canadians and they have very little interest when I say it (I live in Vietnam currently). And yet at the moment they are going through the worst lockdown I've heard of: curfew at 8pm and lifted at 5am. Unheard of. Surely if they thought about it, they would have preferred to have closed the borders and waited it out. That's what COVID successful Asian countries have done.

> this would have been over in a month

Yea. Because everyone would have starved to death.

I believe they had a quarantine island in Marseilles. In one instance lack of observation of this by a trading ship led to an outbreak of the plague in southern France.

Indeed rich merchants lobbied for skipping the quarantine for a ship carrying stocks of cloth. When the plague broke out they ran away, something like 30% of people in Marseille died

TBH harbor-based city states that are similar to old Ragusa (Singapore, Hong Kong) did quite well in Covid pandemics as well.

Big continental empires were always the ones to be most vulnerable.

Yep - the word quarantine itself comes from the Italian "quaranta giorni" (forty days). This was the amount of time that ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor before landing, so as not to infect the Venetians.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) wrote in his medical encyclopedia published in 1025 to isolate for 40 days (Al-Arba'iniyah in Arabic) to prevent the spread of certain diseases. According to some this is where the Italian word was translated from.

Yep. Republic of Ragusa, is present-day Dubrovnik, Croatia (not Ragusa, Italy).

Republic of Ragusa was the first official place in the world to issue a decree for quarantine.

More info about it is here: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/03/the-quarantine-quarter...

Also, the pictures of Dubrovnik do not do it justice. The walled old town is incredible on a sunny day. For some reason, if you view Dubrovnik’s old town (stari grad) on Google Earth on a VR headset, the rendering of the walled old town is very messed up, as in flat as a pancake.

It is quite hilly! Walking the walls is a hike. I was there 10 years ago, and it was surprising just how much of that country remained scarred from the war in the 90s. Especially in the countryside it was common to see shot up old concrete buildings. Painful reminders, but a lovely country where even middle class travelers like myself could afford to eat excellent fresh local seafood and wine with every meal, and it was lovely to have my cousins from Bosnia stop by for a day in Dubrovnik.

> It’s a shame that people even contest the logic today when wholly uneducated people were fine with it hundreds of years ago.

I'm not familiar with that place's history. Are we really sure that (a) that people was uneducated, and (b) all of them were okay with that policy?

Academically uneducated, yes. Intimately familiar with deadly and disfiguring pathogens, yes.

Younger generations in developed countries today are wholly unfamiliar with how destructive an unrestrained pathogen can be.

People are approaching retirement without being able to remember polio, smallpox, tuberculosis or tetanus being endemic.

I suppose younger generations haven't seen measles, mumps, rubella or hepatitis either, but it's not just the young who have little familiarity with pathogens.

Yeah, I was thinking younger as in not geriatric. Im middle aged anybody my parents age and younger hasnt witnessed first hand the hell pathogens can bring.

There's a difference between "quarantine maybe sick people who come from outside" and "quarantine the general population including healthy individuals"

Social distancing is a modern mantra/meme meaning "stay 6 feet apart from others". I wouldn't call it an ancient practice.

"Next up was the six-foot-rule, in which Angelerio instructed that – as translated by Benedictow's team – "People allowed to go out must bear with them a cane measuring six feet long. It is mandatory that people keep this distance from one another."

"And Angelerio went further. He also specified that a large rail, or parabonda, should be added to the counters at shops in which foods are sold, to encourage people to keep their distance – and recommended that, during mass, people should be careful when shaking hands."

Sounds like social distancing to me.

True, but the original comment was quoting something that referred to quarantining and equating it with social distancing. Even if the original medieval author did explicitly endorse a six-foot rule, that original comment was wrong to blur the difference, and the parent was correct to call it out.

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