[2][3][4][5] Merriam-Webster gives various meanings to the noun form, including "a period of 40 days", several relating to ships, "a state of enforced isolation", and as "a restriction on the movement of people and goods which is intended to prevent the spread of disease or pests".

[8] An early mention of isolation occurs in the Biblical book of Leviticus, written in the 7th century BC or perhaps earlier, which describes the procedure for separating out people infected with the skin disease Tzaraath.

[10][non-primary source needed][11]Moses ordered that dwellings from which infected Jews had gone should be inspected before being occupied again, and that people recovering from contagious disease were not to be allowed to go abroad until examined.

[20] A document from 1377 states that before entering the city-state of Ragusa in Dalmatia (modern Dubrovnik in Croatia), newcomers had to spend 30 days (a trentine) in a restricted place (originally nearby islands) waiting to see whether the symptoms of Black Death would develop.

[21] According to current estimates, the bubonic plague had a 37-day period from infection to death; therefore, the European quarantines would have been highly successful in determining the health of crews from potential trading and supply ships.

Those affected by leprosy were historically isolated long-term from society, and attempts were made to check the spread of syphilis in northern Europe after 1492, the advent of yellow fever in Spain at the beginning of the 19th century, and the arrival of Asiatic cholera in 1831.

[citation needed] Venice took the lead in measures to check the spread of plague, having appointed three guardians of public health in the first years of the Black Death (1348).

[29] Most Western countries implemented a range of containment strategies, including isolation, surveillance, and the closure of schools, churches, theatres, and public events.

[33] Since 1852, several conferences were held involving European powers, with a view to uniform action in keeping out infection from the East and preventing its spread within Europe.

No result came of those at Paris (1852), Constantinople (1866), Vienna (1874), and Rome (1885), but each of the subsequent ones doctrine of constructive infection of a ship as coming from a scheduled port, and an approximation to the principles advocated by the United Kingdom for many years.

[citation needed] In the 20th and 21st centuries, people suspected of carrying infectious diseases have been quarantined, as in the cases of Andrew Speaker (multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, 2007) and Kaci Hickox (Ebola, 2014).

[49] The People's Republic of China has employed mass quarantines – firstly of the city of Wuhan and subsequently of all of the Hubei province (population 55.5 million) – in the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.

Children and adolescents may be highly exposed to biopsychosocial stressors generated by the pandemic and once population's containment measures to reduce virus spread are required, they could be potentially affected by the disruption in daily life routine as a result of social isolation and their unseasoned ability to conceive and comprehend the short- and long-term consequences of this outbreak.

[62][63] Quarantine periods can be very short, such as in the case of a suspected anthrax attack, in which people are allowed to leave as soon as they shed their potentially contaminated garments and undergo a decontamination shower.

[citation needed] Standard-Times senior correspondent Steve Urbon (14 February 2003) describes such temporary quarantine powers: Civil rights activists in some cases have objected to people being rounded up, stripped and showered against their will.

Under the Quarantine Act, all travellers must submit to screening and if they believe they might have come into contact with communicable diseases or vectors, they must disclose their whereabouts to a Border Services Officer.

In 1847 the privy council ordered all arrivals with a clean bill of health from the Black Sea and the Levant to be admitted, provided there had been no case of plague during the voyage, and afterwards the practice of quarantine was discontinued.

By the clause in the Levant Trade Act 1752, ships arriving in the United Kingdom with a "foul bill" (i.e. coming from a country where plague existed) had to return to the lazarets of Malta, Venice, Messina, Livorno, Genoa, or Marseille, to complete a quarantine or to have their cargoes opened and aired.

In 1755 lazarets in the form of floating hulks were established in England for the first time, the cleansing of cargo (particularly by exposure to dews) having been done previously on the ship's deck.

About 1788 an order of the council required every ship liable to quarantine to hoist a yellow flag in the daytime and show a light at the main topmast head at night, in case of meeting any vessel at sea, or upon arriving within four leagues of the coast of Great Britain or Ireland, the Channel Islands, or the Isle of Man.

[75] After 1800, ships from plague-affected countries (or with foul bills) were permitted to complete their quarantine in the Medway instead of at a Mediterranean port on the way, and an extensive lazaret was built on Chetney Hill near Chatham (although it was later demolished).

They certified in writing the master of a supposedly infected ship, and detained the vessel provisionally for not more than twelve hours, giving notice meanwhile to the port sanitary authority.

[78] As of 2014, these include Executive Orders 13295[79] 13375, and 13674; the latest executive order specifies the following infectious diseases: cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral haemorrhagic fevers (Lassa, Marburg, Ebola, Crimean-Congo, South American, and others not yet isolated or named), severe acute respiratory syndromes (SARS), and influenza from a novel or re-emergent source.

§§264 and 266 Archived 24 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine, these statutes provide the Secretary of Health and Human Services peacetime and wartime authority to control the movement of people into and within the United States to prevent the spread of communicable disease.

[86] The Immigrant Inspection Station on Ellis Island, built in 1892, is often mistakenly assumed to have been a quarantine station, however its marine hospital (Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital) only qualified as a contagious disease facility to handle less virulent diseases like measles, trachoma and less advanced stages of tuberculosis and diphtheria; those affected by smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, leprosy or typhoid fever, could neither be received nor treated there.

[91] The 1944 Public Health Service Act "to apprehend, detain, and examine certain infected persons who are peculiarly likely to cause the interstate spread of disease" clearly established the federal government's quarantine authority for the first time.

[98] During the 1918 flu pandemic, the then Governor of American Samoa, John Martin Poyer, imposed a full protective sequestration of the islands from all incoming ships, successfully preventing influenza from infecting the population and thus achieving zero deaths within the territory.

This failure by the New Zealand government to prevent and contain the Spanish Flu subsequently rekindled Samoan anti-colonial sentiments that led to its eventual independence.

[105][106] In Hubei, the origin of the epidemic, a cordon sanitaire was imposed on Wuhan and other major cities in China, affecting around 500 million people, which is unprecedented in scale in human history,[107] to limit the rate of spread of the disease.

[citation needed] As the outbreak spread there, beginning 22 February 2020, a cordon sanitaire was imposed on a group of at least 10 different municipalities in Northern Italy, effectively quarantining more than 50,000 people.