Covid-19's long heritage

The Black Death introduced new vocabulary - quarantine - the Italian word for 40, the number of days ship carrying diseased passengers were kept away from dock

“There was not enough ground to bury the great multitude of corpses arriving at every church every day, they were stowed there, one on top of another, like merchandise in the hold of a ship.”  

This was not a recent report from Brazil’s Corona-hit city of Manaus, where coffins were stacked up in trenches for burial.  It was an account of the Black Death some 650 years ago by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio in his masterpiece The Decameron. 

Clearly, notwithstanding breathless reports of “unprecedented” Covid-19 devastation, today’s tragedy is often a replay of scenes witnessed for over two millennia. A quick dip