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27 October 2020 / Athelstane Aamodt
Issue: 7908 / Categories: Features , Covid-19 , Profession
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Managing a pandemic: Back to the future?

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In the light of the coronavirus outbreak, Athelstane Aamodt analyses the approach to managing pandemics across the centuries

We are all living with the interruptions to normal life that have resulted from the government’s response to coronavirus. The Coronavirus Act 2020 and its 29 schedules, not to mention the secondary legislation that has been passed under its aegis, is the legal framework that governs how much of the country will function in the interim.

All of this begs the question: how were such things handled in the past? How, before the existence of an international body like the World Health Organisation (WHO), which was founded in 1948, did countries manage (or not manage) to contain outbreaks of dangerous diseases by means of legal restrictions?

Quarantine

One of the earliest legal impositions designed to limit the spread of dangerous and infectious diseases is something that we still use today: quarantine. The word derives from quarantena which literally means ‘forty days’ in Italian. A document from 1377 tells us

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