Cirrus@Austlit

'In her Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (2001), Geraldine Brooks offers important insights on quarantine, of which the COVID-19 generation desperately needs lessons. There is very little about COVID-19 that is unprecedented, and Brooks shows consonances between COVID-19 experiences on the one hand and events that happened three and a half centuries ago on the other. These are things that could as easily have happened this week as I write, things that demand recognition or risk repetition. As with much quarantine literature, one of the things Year of Wonders reveals is that there is little about the COVID-19 pandemic that is new, with the exception of its truly global nature. The 2020 fascination with the seemingly unprecedented nature of COVID-19 produced misleading and untrue evaluations of our historical experience with viruses. Indeed, a great deal of what the world is facing during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is well within our repertoire of experiences. Despite the fact that quarantine is something that humanity has experienced many times, even before having firm understandings of the microbial mechanisms that underpin the transmission of viruses, quarantine was a part of these experiences, and resistance to quarantine has seemed as predictable as sunrises.'(Publication abstract)