New Delhi, March 12 (TIWN) Senior Congress Leader Shashi Tharoor on Thursday raised questions over government's preparation to deal with novel coronavirus patients, asking if it has enough space to quarantine people coming from abroad.

The epidemic of novel coronavirus (NCOVID) sweeping across China and potentially threatening the world has suddenly brought the word “quarantine” into widespread use. The term goes back to the 1660s, when disease was often carried across the seas on ships, and referred to the period a ship suspected of carrying disease was kept in isolation. Quarantine came from the Italian quarantinagiorni, literally “space of forty days,” from quaranta (forty) and giorni (days), in keeping with the Venetian policy (first enforced in 1377) of keeping ships from plague-stricken countries waiting off its port for 40 days to assure that no communicable cases were aboard, since no effective treatment or cure was known then.

After three centuries of this practice in Italy, the broader sense of “any period of forced isolation” emerged.  Initially, the Venetians reacted to the bubonic plague, known notoriously as the Black Death, which was spreading through Europe between 1347-50 (it is estimated that one-third of Europe’s population died). The Great Council of Ragusa passed a law establishing trentino, or a 30-day period of isolation for ships arriving from plague-affected areas. When in 1377 the isolation period was extended from 30 to 40 days, the term changed from trentino to quarantino. 

Interestingly, in English the word quarantine had an earlier meaning, that of a period of 40 days in which a widow had the right (and some say, the obligation) to remain in her dead husband’s house (1520s), and even earlier, as quarentyne, it had religious connotations, referring to the time in the desert in which Christ fasted for 40 days, Moses’ time on Mount Sinai, and the Catholic observation of Lent, a 40-day period of spiritual purification. Now its usage is perhaps more common and more banal, as in “My dog had to be quarantined when I moved back to India.”

Then Indian students evacuated from the Wuhan area are “in quarantine” in Manesar, along with the brave diplomats (one of them a nephew of mine) who went to arrange their evacuation.