What Dallas can learn from quarantine

In the spring of 1629, the city fathers of Florence closed the mountain passes through the Apennines to protect their city from the bubonic plague that was raging in northern Italy at the time.

It did not work. As we have seen in our time, contagion does not have a great deal of respect for borders. In the summer, the Florentine health authority Sanità struggled with a widespread outbreak that locked the entire population of the city of more than 30,000 in their homes for 40 days.

Sanità’s crisis management was impressive. According to historian John Henderson, the agency opened plague hospitals (military hospitals) in converted mansions and monasteries and provided daily supplies that included two loaves of bread and half a bottle of wine for each person. Portable altars were set up in prominent corners on Sundays so the public could hear services from their windows; an adaptation of the physical infrastructure of the city to the current needs. It was a “most beautiful thing,” as a Florentine observed. Think of it as the precursor to Zoom.

However, the plague intensified the prejudices of the bourgeois leadership. The poor, highly vulnerable due to inferior living conditions and malnutrition, have been blamed for spreading the disease and subjected to tighter enforcement of restrictions and increased incarceration – which could be fatal. Jews were locked away to suffer in their own ghetto.

History, of course, tends to repeat itself. During the COVID-19 pandemic, poor communities and minorities had higher rates of infection, prisons are particularly dangerous, and xenophobia is on the rise.

Taken together, the efforts of the Sanità illustrate a question that bourgeois leaders grapple with to this day: what responsibility does the city’s physical infrastructure have to spread and mitigate the effects of an epidemic?

Some of the most effective infrastructural improvements are based on basic common sense, such as: B. to provide more street space for pedestrians and children for safe outdoor activities. The Slow Streets program, which was launched in collaboration with the city and the Better Block Foundation, among others, was an excellent example of such an initiative. However, as the spread of the pandemic slowed, the city decided not to extend the program, a frustrating decision.

These and other reactions to disease are the subject of a recent new book, Bis Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine (FSG, $ 28) by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, who began their research long before the coronavirus spread.

Urban planning was a key factor in the spread of some of the earliest known epidemics. During the heyday of the empire, Rome became known in 23 BC BC and AD 65, 79 and 182. Affected by a number of epidemics. Almost certainly the sanitary facilities were the culprit, especially the dumping of corpses (people, animals) and feces into the open pits. Rome’s infrastructural feats, its famous underground sewers and aqueducts – designed to protect against infectious diseases – have been overwhelmed by the pressure of urban sprawl.

“Rome conquered itself by its size and greed and never caught up with its own needs,” wrote historian and critic Lewis Mumford.

Urban sprawl is a known problem in what is now North Texas; As in Rome, the ecological, political, social and tax burdens in connection with our expanding infrastructure are proving to be insurmountable.

Public infrastructure hygiene is a persistent problem. In 1854, a cholera outbreak in London was attributed to a single contaminated well, an episode recorded in Steven Johnson’s non-fiction thriller The Ghost Map.

In Dubrovnik, the picturesque city wall on the Adriatic, the idea of ​​quarantine to combat infection was promoted. “When goods came to the Italian region of southern Europe [by ship], they would cross Dubrovnik and thus bring a potential contagion with them, ”says Manaugh. “Dubrovnik responded with architecture and spatial means.”

That meant military hospitals, which are located on small islands off the coast of the city. They were originally built of wood so they could be easily burned in the event of an infection. “Ships had to be anchored in the bay and were patrolled to make sure no people swam into town,” says Manaugh.

The United States has had quarantine stations for centuries and continues to do so. Their existence has not always been without controversy or confrontation. In 1850, rioters set fire to a quarantine station on Staten Island believing it was lax in carrying out its mission.

While quarantine stations have traditionally been located in port cities, America’s new National Quarantine Unit is located inland at the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska’s Medical Center. It opened in Omaha in 2019 after the Ebola epidemic. “Technological advancement means you can place the limit anywhere,” says Twilley.

Boundaries don’t have to be physical; the strongest quarantines could be on our own minds. See the novel Austerlitz by WG Sebald, the story of Jacques Austerlitz, the Holocaust child who spends his adult life suppressing memories of his own history.

“I always refined my defense reactions, created a kind of quarantine or immune system, which, since I kept my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from everything that could still be connected so far away with my own.” “Says Austerlitz. “If, in spite of all precautionary measures, dangerous information came into my hands, which it inevitably did, I was obviously able to close my ears and eyes from simply forgetting it like any other inconvenience.”

As we saw last year, that’s a disastrous attitude; Pathogens have no respect or interest in our prejudices or desires. There are steps that can be taken to build a more resilient city and infrastructure, but the first hurdle will always be to face our challenges honestly.

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