From Covid parking lots to galactic lockdown: fascinating but futile quarantine ideas | Art and design

In January 2020, just days before the first passengers infected with Covid-19 landed in the United States on a flight from Wuhan, preparations were already underway in a converted parking lot in Omaha, Nebraska. Coincidentally, after a decade of planning, the country’s first national quarantine unit opened here on the eve of a global pandemic.

The timing could not have been better. The need for such a place had been raised since September 11, followed by a series of anthrax and Sars attacks, all of which had raised concerns in Congress about the prospect of bioterrorism and the growing global threat of infectious diseases. . Located roughly equidistant from both coasts, the city of Omaha has declared itself the ideal place to isolate those potentially infected with deadly contagions and has received nearly $ 20 million from the US Department of Health for establish an advanced federal quarantine. establishment. With en-suite negative pressure rooms fitted with mini-fridges, TVs, and exercise bikes, it was like a high security, clean hotel. There was only one problem: there were only 20 beds.

When Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley visited the facility under construction in 2019, its jovial manager was optimistic about the scale. “We’re getting by forever without any federal quarantine facilities,” Cieslak told them. “My hunch is that yes, that’s enough. There are just not many deadly diseases that are contagious and potentially transmissible before they cause symptoms to warrant quarantine, he explained. A few days later, hundreds of people potentially infected with a novel coronavirus landed in the United States from China, and soon the whole country was stranded. The Cieslak unit eventually took in passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, who had tested positive for Covid-19, but it was a droplet in a global tsunami.

The fate of the Omaha facility is one of many landmark stories in Manaugh and Twilley’s recent book, Until Safety Is Proven: The History and Future of Quarantine, which reads as a world safari of mankind’s best laid plans that never suffice. Much like the converted parking lot, their book has been in the works for a decade and came out at an opportune time. Since the duo presented an exhibition, Landscapes of Quarantine, at the Storefront Gallery in New York in 2010, they have visited 15th century plague hospitals in Venice, descended on a salt mine used to store nuclear waste at New Mexico, have infiltrated NASA’s cleanest chambers, and hunted down all manner of eccentric characters quietly engaged in personal quests to keep the planet safe.

They are well positioned to tell the story, weaving the spatial, social and scientific facets of medical isolation into an entertaining adventure. Manaugh has built a reputation for unearthing unlikely stories with Bldgblog, a blog that became cult in the 2000s for its sideways look at architecture, examining the built environment through the prism of geology, crime, science fiction, war and acoustics, among others. curious niches. Twilley has taken an equally original approach to food culture, science and landscapes on her blog Edible Geography and most recently as co-host of the Gastropod podcast. Their voracious interests make the book take a certain leap forward, reading itself much like a collection of articles from The New Yorker (to which they both contribute); but the format also allows the reader to enter and exit as they wish and make their own connections.

The intrepid duo begin by following in the footsteps of John Howard, the eccentric 18th-century English prison reformer, who also took a keen interest in the European network of lazarets, or quarantine stations – a health infrastructure that at the time , was totally lacking in Brittany. He was eager to experience the quarantine conditions, so he intentionally boarded a ship with “poor health” and made the two-month voyage from Smyrna (now Izmir, on the west coast). of Turkey) in Venice. , at risk of contracting an incurable disease along the way. Its price when arriving in Venice? “A very dirty room, full of vermin, and without a table, chair or bed,” he wrote. His general verdict on the management of the Venetian lazarets was that “there is such negligence and such corruption in the execution [the] regulations, to the point of making quarantine almost useless ”.

Elsewhere, in a familiar echo of the recent rush to build Covid-19 hospitals – many of which have never really been used – the authors visit ambitious facilities that were either abandoned before their completion or completed long after the disappearance of the threat. The impressive lazaretto of Ancona, for example, was designed as a pentagonal panopticon on an artificial island, but by the time it opened in 1743 the plague was long over.

The pilot waste isolation plant in New Mexico appears to be an equally questionable undertaking, given that those responsible for the facility face a quarantine schedule of at least 10,000 years. Originally planned for 1979, it took another two decades of construction before the half-mile-deep salt mine began to receive its first shipment of nuclear waste – clothes, tools, rags and soil. which had been contaminated during the production of nuclear weapons. . The plan is that by 2033 the facility will be full (with enough waste to fill 100 basketball courts), after which it will be permanently sealed and the salt will collapse around the containers, forming a crystalline grave. The challenge of how to warn future generations of the dangers of what lies below remains unresolved. One suggestion, from the 1980s, is to establish an “atomic priesthood” to cultivate new folklore and new superstitions extolling radioactive horrors underground. Others have suggested a “landscape of thorns” – 50 foot concrete spikes that would scare anyone away in terror. Both would surely make any future archaeologist more eager than ever to start digging.