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Additionally, it occurred to me that the sick people on the ships were locked down, not the cities with the ports.

• shadowgovt 6y ago
  The sick and the healthy were quarantined together on the ships. In the days of ship quarantine, germ theory of medicine and understanding of communicable disease wasn't where it was now; they understood disease communication but not the mechanism. The best solution they had was to have the inbound stay separated from the general populace, because whatever the mechanism, no disease had ever taken as long as 40 days to show up. Once a disease got into a city, entire cities were, indeed, cut off---the sick and the healthy together---because nobody could be sure how the disease would spread if free commerce were allowed into the surrounding cities and towns. (There's an interesting parallel to COVID-19, in that while we do understand germ theory of medicine, we don't have accurate enough testing to determine if the average healthy-looking person is a carrier. So the practical solutions lean towards the conservative side of safety. More accurate, higher-speed testing could decrease the need for general behavioral constraints in the population... If, for example, there was a 'forehead scanner' to tell us if someone had COVID-19 to 99.999% accuracy, instead of merely had a fever, we could install it at every store entrance and forego masks).