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A comment on The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May. Parent comment

Re:The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is bein... by thu2111 on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @07:46AM (#23006048)
No. Preventative mass global quarantine has never been tried anywhere. Even quarantines in classical times were used for the already infected and known to be infectious, not everyone at once. What's being done now has no precedent.
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Re:The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is bein... by gizmondo on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @07:56AM (#23006128)
Global quarantine has never been tried just because there was (almost) no global travel or communication.

And I think your second statement is false, preventive isolation en masse was practiced (to the extent possible) during bubonic plague.

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Re:The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is bein... by ashtonkem on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @10:44AM (#23007461)
The name quarantine itself comes from a preventative isolation practice.

But lockdowns during pandemics have been practiced occasionally, but always at the city level, due to the nature of governance during past pandemics. Famously Newton and Shakespeare did work during London lockdowns, and some Italian city states distributed fixed rations to peasants to help them stay at home.

What’s new isn’t preventative quarantines, what’s new is global travel and communication.

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