| A New (and Deadly) Kind of March Madness |  |
By John Freivalds
Published March 18th, 2020
Duluth News Tribune
In March 1383, Venice, in what is now Italy, decreed a novel policy: Ships coming from cities suffering the black plague would be required to be moored in the Venetian lagoon for 40 days. “The black plague was horrifying, causing grotesque bubbles to swell from the armpits, face and groin and causing an outbreak of delirium, "wrote the poet Giovanni Boccaccio.
Yuck!
“Sailors going back to their homes embraced and kissed us,” Boccaccio further wrote. “They in turn infected their whole families who in three days succumbed."
This March, 637 years later, we are threatened again by another virus we don't know how to counter.
The Italian word for that 40-day quarantine period is quaratino, from which the word quarantine came. In 1468, Venice introduced another twist, the creation of a quarantine station called a lazaretto, a small island where ships could lay in harbor to wait out their 40 days.
Now we ship off quarantined cruise ship passengers to remote military bases for 14 days.
Back then, nefarious rulers knew how to weaponize the black plague. In the 1498 siege of Messina in Sicily, invaders put black plague cadavers on catapults and flung them into the walled city, hoping to infect the populace. What's the phrase, “All's fair in love and war”?
Today, cruise ships from around the world are not allowed to enter some ports, fearing the poor distraught passengers carry the virus. Italy has quarantined the whole country. In New York, the city of New Rochelle has been quarantined. And we are not done yet, as fear is replacing logic in dealing with the virus. Meanwhile, oil and stock markets crash.
As an old commodities trader would say, you know that perception is reality.
So what gives? In 637 years, have we not figured out how to stop pandemics? By some estimates, half the population of Europe died from the black plague. Folklorists Peter and Iona Oied theorized that the kids' medieval nursery rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosie,” has to do with the black plague. They wrote, "A rosy rash was a symptom of the plague and posie are herbs that were carried around as protection to ward off the horrific smell of the plagues. Sneezing and coughing was a final symptom and all fall down was exactly what happened.”
The coronavirus has opened a debate on how much effort is going into the area of biological weapons. Leon Thompson, writing in Forbes magazine, said, “Today threats are harder to anticipate. From the use of jetliners in the 9/11 attacks to the appearance of unexploded explosive devices in Iraq to the growing use of drones to the proliferation of cyber and biological threats, policymakers are continuously confronted by unexpected challengers." All these threats are called asymmetrical by the military that is accustomed to fighting wars with bombs and jets, machine guns and tanks.
As yet, as far as I know, no one has mentioned what happened in Haskell County, Kansas in 1904. A virus then called the Spanish flu killed more U.S. soldiers than would be shot in the Vietnam War. According to Thompson, the Spanish flu killed more people around the world in a year than the black plague in the Middle Ages. Efforts to find a vaccine against it were frustrated for years, such that the hope was that the pandemic business would exhaust itself rather than being defeated by human intervention.
Yet President Donald Trump says the vaccine to defeat the coronavirus will be ready in a couple of months — while medical experts say it will be a year or more.
A real question facing Duluth: when a saltie comes into the inner harbor from a country with a coronavirus outbreak, will sailors be allowed to disembark?
John Freivalds of Wayzata, Minn., is the author of six books and is the honorary consul of Latvia in Minnesota. His website is jfapress.com. He wrote this for the News Tribune.