[HN Gopher] The 432-year-old manual on social distancing
___________________________________________________________________
The 432-year-old manual on social distancing
Author : Thevet
Score : 82 points
Date : 2021-01-10 20:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| Link to the original, in Latin and Italian (starts page 26):
| http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000056943 If I understand
| correctly, the manual's step 1 is to pray for mercy.
| anoncake wrote:
| > In reality, it's thought that the epidemic killed 60% of the
| city's population.
|
| Yes, that is the kind of epidemic for which social isolation is
| an appropriate response.
| TT3351 wrote:
| 432 years ago we didn't have nearly the scientific medical
| knowledge we do today; one might expect all outbreaks of
| disease to have vastly improved outcomes today than 430 years
| ago. Does that make further mitigation efforts worthless?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Sure, to a degree, but when hospitalization rates are <
| 5%[1], it's pretty hard to argue that medical science is
| preventing a 60% death rate.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/07/covid-
| hosp...
| war1025 wrote:
| > Does that make further mitigation efforts worthless?
|
| Mitigation efforts are certainly worthwhile, but there are
| significant diminishing returns.
|
| I would guess that 80/20 rule applies to mitigation efforts
| just as much as anything else. The vast majority of
| protection is provided by a fairly minimal set of
| precautions.
|
| I think we see this borne out in the data. The places with
| the strictest lockdowns are doing better than the places with
| fewer restrictions. However, the numbers aren't so night and
| day different as to suggest that those additional lockdowns
| have been worth the price.
|
| One thing I've wondered is how many "odd" social customs in
| various cultures (no singing / dancing, face coverings, etc.)
| could actually be explained by past epidemics. We've
| certainly adopted many of those restrictions in short order.
| scoot wrote:
| No, just worth less.
| anoncake wrote:
| No, it just means they are rarely worth it.
| JacobiX wrote:
| 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."
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| war1025 wrote:
| 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"
| Timpy wrote:
| 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| gringoDan wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| yread wrote:
| 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
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-11 22:01 UTC)