Quarantine in the context of "1925 serum run to Nome"

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a 1947 absurdist novel by Albert Camus. The plot centers around the French Algerian city of Oran as it combats a plague outbreak and is put under a city-wide quarantine. The novel presents a snapshot into life in Oran as seen through Camus's absurdist lens.

Camus used as source material the cholera epidemic that killed a large proportion of Oran's population in 1849, but set the novel in the 1940s. Oran and its surroundings were struck by disease several times before Camus published his novel. According to an academic study, Oran was decimated by the bubonic plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks (in 1921: 185 cases; 1931: 76 cases; and 1944: 95 cases) were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of non-pharmaceutical interventions, particularly lockdowns (encompassing stay-at-home orders, curfews, quarantines, cordons sanitaires and similar societal restrictions), were implemented in numerous countries and territories around the world. By April 2020, about half of the world's population was under some form of lockdown, with more than 3.9 billion people in more than 90 countries or territories having been asked or ordered to stay at home by their governments.

In addition to the health effects of lockdown restrictions, researchers had found the lockdowns may have reduced crime and violence by armed non-state actors, such as the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups. In addition, lockdowns had increased the uptake of telecommuting, reduced airborne pollution, and increased adoption of digital payment systems.

Molecular diagnostics is a collection of techniques used to analyze biological markers in the genome and proteome, and how their cells express their genes as proteins, applying molecular biology to medical testing. In medicine the technique is used to diagnose and monitor disease, detect risk, and decide which therapies will work best for individual patients, and in agricultural biosecurity similarly to monitor crop- and livestock disease, estimate risk, and decide what quarantine measures must be taken.

By analysing the specifics of the patient and their disease, molecular diagnostics offers the prospect of personalised medicine.These tests are useful in a range of medical specialties, including infectious disease, oncology, human leucocyte antigen typing (which investigates and predicts immune function), coagulation, and pharmacogenomics—the genetic prediction of which drugs will work best. They overlap with clinical chemistry (medical tests on bodily fluids).

Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) or hoof-and-mouth disease (HMD) is an infectious and sometimes fatal viral disease that primarily affects even-toed ungulates, including domestic and wild bovids. The virus causes a high fever lasting two to six days, followed by blisters inside the mouth and near the hoof that may rupture and cause lameness.

FMD has very severe implications for animal farming, since it is highly infectious and can be spread by infected animals comparatively easily through contact with contaminated farming equipment, vehicles, clothing, and feed, and by domestic and wild predators. Its containment demands considerable efforts in vaccination, strict monitoring, trade restrictions, quarantines, and the culling of both infected and healthy (uninfected) animals.

Caragea's plague (Romanian: Ciuma lui Caragea) was a bubonic plague epidemic that occurred in Wallachia, mainly in Bucharest, in the years 1813 and 1814. It coincided with the rule of the Phanariote Prince Ioan Caragea.

The outbreak in Bucharest started in April 1813, but there were no recorded deaths until June. A quarantine was established, the city gates of Bucharest were closed, and guards were placed to prevent anyone from entering the city without permission. The foreigners and non-residents were expelled from the city, and the city's beggars were relocated to monasteries beyond the city's walls. Within the city, public meetings in pubs and coffee shops were forbidden. Alcohol sales were only allowed for domestic use. To avoid the formation of crowds, markets and schools were closed down, and the prisoners in the debtors' prison were set free.

On 23 January 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the State Council of China imposed a lockdown in Wuhan and other cities in Hubei in an effort to quarantine the center of an outbreak of COVID-19; this action was commonly referred to as the Wuhan lockdown (Chinese: 武汉封城; pinyin: Wǔhàn fēng chéng). The World Health Organization (WHO), although stating that it was beyond its own guidelines, commended the move, calling it "unprecedented in public health history". CCP general secretary Xi Jinping said he personally authorized the unprecedented lockdown of Wuhan and other cities beginning on 23 January.

The lockdown in Wuhan set the precedent for similar measures in other Chinese cities. Within hours of the Wuhan lockdown, travel restrictions were also imposed on the nearby cities of Huanggang and Ezhou, and were eventually imposed on all 15 other cities in Hubei, affecting a total of about 57 million people. On 2 February 2020, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, implemented a seven-day lockdown in which only one person per household was allowed to exit once each two days, and most of the highway exits were closed. On 13 March 2020, Huangshi and Qianjiang became the first Hubei cities to remove strict travel restrictions within part or all of their administrative confines. On 8 April 2020, the Wuhan lockdown officially ended. The lockdown, combined with other public health measures in early 2020, succeeded in suppressing virus transmission and averted a more widespread outbreak in China.

In epidemiology, a non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI), also known as a public health and social measure, is a method used to reduce the spread of an epidemic disease without requiring pharmaceutical drug treatments. Examples of non-pharmaceutical interventions that reduce the spread of infectious diseases include wearing a face mask and staying away from sick people.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) points to personal, community, and environmental interventions. NPIs have been recommended for pandemic influenza at both local and global levels and studied at large scale during the 2009 swine flu pandemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. NPIs are typically used in the period between the emergence of an epidemic disease and the deployment of an effective vaccine.

A stay-at-home order, safer-at-home order, movement control order – also referred to by loose use of the terms quarantine, isolation, or lockdown – is an order from a government authority that restricts movements of a population as a mass quarantine strategy for suppressing or mitigating an epidemic or pandemic by ordering residents to stay home except for essential tasks or for work in essential businesses. The medical distinction between such an order and a quarantine is that a quarantine is usually understood to involve isolating only selected people who are considered to be possibly infectious rather than the entire population of an area (though many colloquially refer to stay-at-home orders as quarantines). In many cases, outdoor activities are allowed. Non-essential businesses are either closed or adapted to remote work. In some regions, it has been implemented as a round-the-clock curfew or called a shelter-in-place order, but it is not to be confused with a shelter-in-place situation.

Similar measures have been used around the world, and, both officially and colloquially, different names have been used to refer to them, often only very loosely linked to the term's actual medical meaning. Examples include confinement, (self-) isolation, (self-) quarantine, lockdown or strict social distancing measures. Stay-at-home orders have colloquially (and sometimes officially) been referred to as quarantine or lockdown – but some officials have a concern that the word lockdown may send a wrong message for people to incorrectly think that it includes door-to-door searching for infected people to be forced into quarantines similar to the Hubei lockdown.

In public health, social distancing, also called physical distancing, is a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions or measures intended to prevent the spread of a contagious disease by maintaining a physical distance between people and reducing the number of times people come into close contact with each other. It usually involves keeping a certain distance from others (the distance specified differs from country to country and can change with time) and avoiding gathering together in larger groups.

By minimising the probability that a given uninfected person will come into physical contact with an infected person, the disease transmission can be suppressed, resulting in fewer deaths. The measures may be used in combination with other public health recommendations, such as good respiratory hygiene, use of face masks when necessary, and hand washing. To slow down the spread of infectious diseases and avoid overburdening healthcare systems, particularly during a pandemic, several social-distancing measures have been used, including the closing of schools and workplaces, isolation, quarantine, restricting the movement of people and the cancellation of mass gatherings. Drawbacks of social distancing can include loneliness, reduced productivity and the loss of other benefits associated with human interaction.