Lessons from the 1656 Neapolitan Plague: Something to learn for the current coronavirus Pandemic?

ABSTRACT

In the spring of 1656, an epidemic of bubonic plague suddenly fell on Naples, the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The epidemic had put a strain on the government authorities, forcing them to take sometimes drastic measures but, in most cases, scarcely decisive. The current health emergency caused by Covid-19 disease has many similarities with the epidemics of the past. Here we report the parallelism among plague and Covid-19 in several respects. Taking as a paradigm the plague epidemic of Naples of 1656, we can easily understand how history, showing us how past epidemics were managed and overcome, even with the intrinsic differences due to the limits of time and scientific progress, can still give us a useful lesson to face the present.