Where does quarantine collide?

The separation and restricted movement of people, animals, or goods that may have been exposed to a contagious disease, imposed for a set period so that infection cannot pass to others. The practice began in the Adriatic port of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, in 1377 and in Venice soon after, where arriving ships and travellers were held in isolation, first for thirty days and then forty, the quaranta giorni that gave the practice its name; John Howard's 1789 An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe surveyed the mature system of quarantine stations, and Tognotti's 2013 history traced its path from plague to modern influenza. The referent is a public health measure applied to living people or cargo judged to carry a disease risk, distinct from a widow's right to a house and from the handling of a suspect computer file.[1][2]

Unit

A period of enforced isolation, historically forty days, applied to exposed people, animals, or goods

Recovery means

The isolation ends once the incubation period passes with no illness and clean status, historically called pratique, is granted

Measured by

Set by the length of isolation and the number of people or shipments held; tracked in public health records and port registers

The isolation of code or files judged to be malicious or suspect, moved into a restricted holding area or blocked from spreading so that they cannot reach the rest of a system or network. Moore, Shannon, Voelker, and Savage's 2003 Internet Quarantine: Requirements for Containing Self-Propagating Code set out what automatic containment would have to achieve to halt a fast-spreading worm, and the same word names the routine antivirus step of sealing a flagged file away from the parts of a computer that could run it. The referent is a technical containment action inside computers and networks, which takes its name from the medical measure but is unrelated to the isolation of people or to a widow's legal right to a home.[3]

Unit

One isolated file, process, or host removed from normal operation

Recovery means

A quarantined item may be restored if later judged safe, or deleted if confirmed malicious

Measured by

Counted by items quarantined and by the share of a network's hosts or traffic contained; evaluated by how fast spread is halted