Paris (AFP)

Plague, cholera and yellow fever: it was in response to major epidemics that quarantines, from the Middle Ages, then sanitary cordon were invented and regularly applied, as is still the case in China in the face of the advance of the new coronaviruses.

- Before Wuhan, any precedents? -

Restrictions on movement in the Wuhan region, the metropolitan area of ​​11 million people in central China, affect the daily lives of more than 40 million Chinese.

"These quarantines are on the scale of the Chinese population. Outside the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003, there is nothing that can approach the size of this operation. Except perhaps the quarantine of Bombay struck by the plague in 1898 ", explains to AFP Patrick Zylberman, specialist in health history at the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health (EHESP).

More recently, during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa (2013-2016), border closure, containment and quarantine measures were imposed on several occasions.

Thus, the six million Sierra Leoneans were forced to stay at home for three days in September 2014 and again in March 2015. This "general confinement" aimed to stop the epidemic.

- Quarantine or sanitary cordon? -

A quarantine is a temporary isolation imposed on people, ships or animals coming from a country infected by a contagious disease, according to the definition of the Larousse dictionary.

The cordon cordon, for its part, corresponds to surveillance posts to control and block the entry or exit of an area affected by an epidemic.

In the case of the Chinese epidemic, it is the equivalent of a huge sanitary cordon that is installed around the Wuhan region.

- Birth of quarantine -

It was to protect themselves from the plague that the first documented measures to isolate ships from infested areas appeared in the 14th and 15th centuries, in Dubrovnik (Croatia) in 1377 and then in Venice (Italy) from 1423.

The imposed duration of isolation, 40 days, determines the word "quarantine". The establishments which accommodate confined crews bear the name of lazaretto: deformation of the name of the islet in the Venetian lagoon where the ships docked, Santa Maria di Nazaret, or else reference to the leper of the Bible, Lazarus.

Quarantines are then regularly adopted in Europe during epidemics until the great cholera pandemic that affected the continent in the 1830s.

- Appearance of the sanitary cordon -

The term "sanitary cordon" was born in France in the 19th century when in 1821 Paris sent 30,000 soldiers to block the border with Spain, in order to prevent the spread of an epidemic of yellow fever.

But well before this date, health barriers were sometimes established during major plague epidemics, recalls Tom Solomon.

This British specialist in emerging diseases at the University of Liverpool cites "the famous example" of the voluntary isolation in 1665 of the village of Eyam (England) after a case of plague to avoid contaminating the rest of the region.

In the south-east of France, a "plague wall" was erected in the Vaucluse in 1721 over 27 kilometers to protect the Comtat Venaissin region from the plague which then raged in Marseille and Provence.

- Efficiency in question -

Restrictions on movement can be "counterproductive", causing panic and prompting people to flee at all costs, said Tom Solomon.

They can also lead to serious social unrest as was the case in Bombay during the plague epidemic at the end of the 19th century due to the forced hospitalizations of men and women without distinction of caste, explains Patrick Zylberman.

Closer to home, the outbreak of SARS in China in 2003 led to riots and violent demonstrations in the regions of Nanjing and Shanghai (east) following brutal quarantines, said this historian in his essay "Microbial storms".

© 2020 AFP