This is one of the key takeaways from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. As devastating as this figure is, it could have been much worse. Before the end of 1666, the Bubonic Plague will kill roughly one-quarter of the city’s population. The city in question is not Wuhan or Milan or Manhattan. Upstanding citizens, deputized in various capacities as searchers, examiner, and watchmen, were - under the penalty of death - tasked with overseeing this quarantine. Infected individuals were locked in their houses with their families and were forbidden from leaving under the penalty of death. Public events and gatherings were banned, schools were closed and the city was divided into more readily policeable quarters. Invoking emergency measures passed in earlier times, the mayor issued a series of orders that aggressively changed life in the city. Those who stayed had a range of reactions: many laid siege to the markets, stocking up on provisions before barricading themselves and their families in their homes some congregated in churches while others consulted astronomers and fortune-tellers many more, dismissive of the invisible disease or the visible fear it stoked in the masses, continued their lives unabated. Those with means hurriedly packed their belongings and fled the city. The panic began the moment the earliest cases were confirmed.
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