'Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley

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Courtesy of Macmillan Publishers

In an unwelcome synchronicity, while the authors researched their history of quarantine, quarantine suddenly became news again. What Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley had already learned by March 2020 was that whether confronted by the Black Death or COVID-19, the questions remain the same: how to balance public health with economic health and how to administer quarantine fairly, compassionately?

Fairness and compassion were not always top of mind for governments throughout history (and in some nations today), whose main concern was keeping the trade routes open in the face of death on a large-scale. Until Proven Safe is a beautifully written travelogue of places where people had been quarantined in earlier times, as well as a meditation on the ways and means, the rights and wrongs, of isolating people to prevent the spread of deadly contagions. 

And yet, no matter how badly it has sometimes been administered, isolating the sick from the healthy remains one of the rational responses to deadly viruses. “Quarantine can and must be culturally reclaimed as an act of personal responsibility, precisely to help avoid some of the dystopian acts of technological enforcement that otherwise seem imminent,” the authors insist. Mainland China races to mind.

Until Proven Safe is most interesting for its history, recalling the forgotten connection between passports and public health and the steps taken by NASA to prevent lunar microbes (if they exist) to return home with the Apollo astronauts. The authors were obviously under sudden pressure to respond to the rapidly changing present moment while completing their manuscript on deadline. The experts they cite conclude that the employment of quarantine must be carefully calibrated to fit each new situation. “Diseases that are transmissible before symptoms appear,” are especially challenging and we are given no reason to end preparations for epidemics once COVID-19 has been contained.