Quarantine: What Does it Mean?

 I've been reading a lot of information, and seeing results on social media. Information about how the Spanish flu epidemic (as it was called in those days) was handled.

The most popular social "call to arms" concerns wearing masks.

They didnt legislate masks back in those days. People weren't forced to wear them.

While it is true that the federal and state governments weren't creating mandates on the issues, most towns and cities did make laws.

Rather, they enforced existing laws.

Back in those days, there were laws called Quarantine laws. 

If your household had a contagious illness (measles, diptheria, whooping cough, smallpox) public health officials came and posted a great big, very red sign on your door.

QUARANTINE by order of...

With that sign on the door, no one left the home. No one entered the home, or if they did, they had to remain throughout the quarantine period.

Doctors, nurses, and police were the only people allowed access, and even then had to follow strict routines, which included sanitizing. Sanitizing sometimes included complete changes of clothing.

Groceries and medicines were delivered to the doorstep. Neighbors could drop off gifts on the porch. 

Once they left, the subjects of the quarantine could bring in the deliveries.

There was no question of going to work.

There was no thought of going out to eat.

No one went to the park or the playground. In some cases, even the back yard was off limits.

People didn't protest this, although they grumbled and had the same worries we do today. Keeping job, paying rent, nor having machinery repossessed.

They didn't protest because they knew.

Infectious diseases were frequent, common, and deadly if the protocols were not followed. There were fatalities any time one of these visited a neighborhood, or a town, or a city. 

But the quick imposing of a quarantine could lower the deaths and limit any lingering impairment. Centuries of experience had proven this many times. And if it could be stopped in the neighborhood before it reached into the town, there would be even fewer deaths and disabilities. Everyine wins.

No one questioned it.

If anyone thought of their constitutional rights, they tended to focus on the one first mentioned. The right to Life. They knew the quarantine laws were the most effective defense of the right to life.

After the Spanish flu, we became more educated. 

We made new discoveries.

We discovered bacteria, viruses, antibiotics, and vaccinations.

We learned surgeries and therapies. Epidemics, renamed pandemics, were a thing of the past.

And

We forgot.

Time was proving out how much better off we were, overall. There were outbreaks of things, usually in strictly limited geographic areas. These were handled by the combination of better medicines and the routines of the quarantine programs.

We were smug.

We could handle it.

Until the day and the disease came and there was no controlled access. Everyone was going everywhere. With everything.

And the virus spread around the world. 

It's still spreading. 

So.

Do not share information without understanding it, if you can help it. 

Before you condemn proven effective actions, consider the history behind them and ask yourself in what ways things have changed and what changes we should keep and which are not working as we have hoped.

Above all else, remember that the right to life comes before the right to liberty.

Names for All

 I read a lot of advice columns -- or I did before the internet decided everybody needed to pay everyone every day for the privilege. I miss them, and no one is eating in restaurants and leaving their papers for the next guy. 

Anyway, people can write to advice columns about some pretty silly things. Which way to hang your toilet paper roll comes up semi-regularly. 

Lately, a popular topic has been names.

Did you know people are stealing names? If you've been named after someone, your parents were unoriginal name thieves. If you've been named a common name, your parents are name thieves and unoriginal.

Did these people really never go to school with classmates bearing the same name? No reason to know Chris C is not Chris S. That Jennifer H is not Jennifer G?

How did that not happen?

Someone wrote in crying that his sibling stole the name Nola from him. He thought it would be cute to name her after the Big Easy, when he saw it written that way, once upon a time. 

Sorry, bud, it's not a new name, nor a newly invented one. It's been around a few hundred years in one language or another. Probably several. 

I do have more respect for those trying for something original. (As long as it isn't bulky, awkward, or too weird.) Jayken and a middle name, for grandpas James and Kenny and Uncle Mark (middle name). Little girl's names can be pretty if one wants to go for the feminine or the flowing. (Sometimes dangerous in today's belligerent society.)

Nobody owns a name. Even if you put together a unique portmanteau name, someone will see it on a birth announcement, or on social media, or hear you say it in a store, and think, oh that sounds so (adjective they like) and will remember it, and within a few weeks everyone will be naming their child your unique name. 

They may be the first with it (unlikely, but possible) but tell that to a high school sophomore with a lot of freshmen with the same name. 

Even copyright laws acknowledge that names are void from being owned. The main we reason we all can't write Gone With the Wind is because one novel with that title so impressed itself upon the public that any others will look like pale copies, even if it's a completely different subject matter.

It's not illegal.

Names cannot be owned. 

I have to admit, though, I did feel a pang of ~ something ~ with/for the woman who wrote in that her aunt stole her planned baby name and gave it to her dog. I don't have a lot of patience for dogs with kids' names, although 1) it's none of my business and 2) it's okay in honor of someone or 3) named after the giver or other VIP. 

And imagine if it's a kid with a dog's name? Rover Fido Smith, you come back here right now. 

And that is why I don't know if I feel sympathy or mockery for that woman. Because I don't know if she was giving her child a dog name, or if the dog was getting a human name.

I just wish she had used an example in her letter!

Strange New World

 I think everyone can agree, at least here in the US, that this year has changed the world. Changed the norms. "They" keep talking about the "New Normal" -- which is a long way from normal, and isn't even all the new. It's just never affected so much population at the same time, largely because there has never been so much population at the same time before. 

The big thing for us all -- the world -- has been the pandemic; the covid; the coronavirus; the new plague; the new SARS. Whatever you want to call it. 

But it wasn't the only thing. The year started off wrong before then. Schools were already closing because people were getting sick, but this sickness in these great numbers has absolutely noithing to do with the one that came along later.

Australia was on fire. 

There have been eclipses and earthquakes. There have been floods and even more fires. (Last I knew, Colorado was still burning.) There have been killer hornets and hurricanes. There have been Supermoons and Micromoons and blue moons. Wearing -- or not wearing -- a face mask became a civil right, while people are still being denied housing or help or work and being waited on. 

I'm forgetting a lot. 

No doubt come the end of the year, everyone will have lists and stories and who-knows-what. 

The scary thing is there's still seven weeks for even more fun to be had. 

This week alone we've had elections and reactions and Boston was shaken.  Who knows what the future still has for us?

Many people have died.

Some have been born, yes. 

Births and Deaths, the most universal of human experiences were, for a while, legislated to be done alone, with no family near; with no loved ones attending. 

Imagine having ONLY strangers to share your most intimate, most human moments with no one of your own. You may not even know their names, and because of masks, you definitely don't know their faces.

Too many of these deaths were NOT caused by Covid. 

Too many of these had nothing to do with the Great Illness.

They were dying of normla things. Flu, and emphysema, and liver failure, and kidney failure. Aneurysms and strokes and hemorrhages murders and suicides. 

Accidents and terminal diseases. 

My oldest daughter died of a cancer of unknown origin. 

In approximately six weeks, she went from having achy legs to be dead. 

And I couldn't be there for her, in person. In myself. 

I couldn't talk with her -- she lost her voice. 

I couldn't hold her hand.

I couldn't say good-bye, let alone sit with her as she left us all forever.

This is unforgettable.

This is unforgiveable.