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COVID-19 -

The social distancing measures that we have all become so familiar with thanks to COVID-19, such as staying at home whenever possible, are nothing new.

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16th century -

In fact, they can be traced as far back as the 16th century, when a doctor in Italy implemented strikingly similar measures to contain an outbreak of the plague.

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Alghero plague -

The plague arrived in Alghero, Sardinia in November 1582, and historians believe it was brought by a mariner who had arrived from Marseille, France, where the plague was already at large.

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Deadly disease -

Within days of arriving in Alghero the sailor who had brought the disease with him was dead, and much of the city’s population was doomed to suffer the same fate.

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Deadly disease -

Estimates as to just how deadly the outbreak in Alghero was vary to a great degree. One historian from the 18th century put the death count at 6,000 and the survivor count at 150.

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Deadly disease -

In reality, it is now believed that the disease wiped out 60% of the city’s population. Either way, the death rate was extraordinary and necessitated the digging of mass graves.

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Old news -

By the time the 16th century rolled around, the plague was nothing new. It had already been around for centuries, tearing up families and causing general devastation.

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The Black Death -

The worst documented episode of the plague was the Black Death, which ripped across Europe and Asia in 1346 and caused the death of roughly 50 million people.

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Paris plagues -

There was never such an awful outbreak of the plague again, but it did crop up regularly over the coming centuries. In Paris, for example, it reportedly arose one out of every three years until 1670.

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Alghero plague -

Back to the 1582 outbreak in Alghero, Sardinia. Despite the devastation that the arrival of the disease caused, historians believe that things could have been a lot worse.

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Protomedicus -

It is thought that the outbreak was contained relatively successfully thanks to the measures introduced by one prescient doctor, Quinto Tiberio Angelerio (1532-1617).

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Doctor from Sicily -

The doctor himself came from Sicily, where there had been a plague epidemic in 1575. When the sailor arrived in Alghero with symptoms of the plague and later two women with symptoms died, the doctor knew what to do.

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Cordons -

Denied permission to quarantine his patients, he mounted a triple sanitary cordon around the city, thereby preventing trade with people from outside.

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Changing opinions -

Initially the measures he introduced were extremely unpopular with the people of Alghero, but as the situation worsened people came round and he was entrusted with the containment of the outbreak.

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Medical booklet -

In the booklet that he published years later, ‘Ectypa Pestilentis Status Algheriae Sardiniae,’ Dr. Angelerio described the 57 measures he introduced to contain the Alghero plague.

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Stay at home -

Firstly, people were advised to stay at home and send out only one member of the household to do the shopping. Meetings, dances, and entertainment were banned.

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Florence lockdown -

These lockdown measures were not unique to Alghero; according to one historian at Birkbeck, University of London, the city of Florence, for example, imposed a lockdown in 1631.

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Rule breakers -

According to the same historian, he found 550 cases of people being prosecuted for flouting lockdown regulations between the summer of 1630 and the summer of 1631.

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Sound familiar? -

Some transgressions were minor, with people accidentally breaking the rules, while others were more serious. There were reports of people climbing across the roofs of houses to meet friends.

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Six-foot rule -

Then there was the 'six-foot rule,' under which anyone who was allowed to leave the house had to do so with a six-foot (about two meters) cane. It was mandatory that people maintained that distance between themselves.

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Parallels -

To historians’ knowledge, this sort of regulation has not cropped up elsewhere in history. And yet the outbreak of COVID-19 prompted the introduction of a very similar rule in various countries across the world.

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Parallels -

In countries where such a rule was introduced, the recommended physical distance to be maintained was two meters (about 6.6 feet), although in some places this has been reduced to 1 or 1.5 meters (about 3 to 5 feet).

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Washing objects -

Another piece of advice from Dr. Angelerio to the people of Alghero was to wash household objects. He lived during a time when scientists were beginning to understand more about how disease spreads.

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Scientific progress -

Whereas until around 1500 it was believed that diseases were carried by “bad air,” during the 16th century people began to understand that it was possible to become sick by touching a contaminated object.

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Household objects -

Angelerio advised that people should disinfect and ventilate their homes, amongst other measures. He even said that non-valuable objects should be burned.

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Similarities -

It was also common practice to wash goods, in particular textiles that had come off ships, as they arrived in the home. The resemblance with the COVID-19 'wash your shopping' practice is clear.

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Health passports -

Although it didn’t work for Alghero, the concept of a health passport can also be traced back hundreds of years. It has long since been common practice to check the status of people wanting to enter a city.

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CommonPass -

Sometimes the authorities would issue documents to show that a given traveler was plague-free. The parallel here with CommonPass, the digital document that contains a person’s COVID-19 record, is easily drawn.

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Other similarities -

The list of similarities between Dr. Angelerio’s measures and the COVID-19 rules does not stop here. The concept of quarantine facilities for infected persons and assigning high-risk jobs to survivors was also present in his booklet.

Sources: (BBC)

See also: The deadliest pandemics in history

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