In July 1665, a sudden plague appeared in London, the capital of England, and gradually increased, eventually leading to a large-scale outbreak; this plague known as the "Black Death" hung over London and spread through the air, eventually killing nearly 100,000 people.
King Charles II was so horrified that, on the advice of his staff and physicians, he fled with his family and ministers to Oxford, 60 miles (about 90 kilometers).
The rich people in the ancient city of London saw that the king had run away, felt that something was wrong, and dragged their families with them, competing to flee, and for a time the streets were crowded with people who were fleeing.
When the rich fled, the formerly bustling and bustling city of London suddenly became deserted, and the door became a dead city, and only the poor people who had no place to live and nowhere to escape were left in the city.
On the streets of London, patients often fall to the ground suddenly and die. The situation of people who do not go out at home is not much better, and some patients are not found until they emit the smell of corpses after death.
Due to the extreme contagiousness of the disease and the extreme lack of medical resources, the number of deaths has increased, from more than 100 people per day to more than 300 people, and even finally to more than 1,000 people.
The corpse transporters of the municipal department resisted the pressure and pulled a steady stream of corpses to the outside of the city day and night to be hastily buried, and there were only stray cats and dogs nibbling on the corpses on the streets, which can be described as a purgatory on earth.
When King Charles II abandoned his people and did nothing to stop the spread of the plague, some local officials, doctors, and priests of conscience spontaneously organized themselves and stayed behind to lead the people to fight the epidemic.
In order to control this wave of the epidemic and save the lives of the public, the epidemic prevention personnel locked the sick in their own homes, and nailed the doors and windows to allow no one to enter or leave.
In addition to giving these patients food and drink every day, it is strictly forbidden for anyone to come into contact with them and isolate them to prevent plague cross-infection.
In the absence of medicine, people had to resign themselves to their fate if they wanted to live, and in less than a month, more than 10,000 people died in the London city alone.
It was not until the end of that year that the plague slowly disappeared; according to incomplete statistics, more than 100,000 people died in the plague in London, accounting for almost 1/5 of the population of London at that time.
In this epidemic, the authorities continued to carry out foreign trade in order to make profits from the export of goods, in addition to concealing the epidemic from the outside world, which once affected other countries in Europe.
The cause of the epidemic in London was mainly caused by the land enclosure movement carried out in Britain at that time, which caused many people to lose their land and homes and had to enter the big city of London to make a living, and these poor people gathered more and more, eventually forming a dilapidated slum.
Because the simple houses in the slums are too dense, the population is too large, all kinds of household garbage are not cleaned up, dirty and smelly, and the garbage and feces piled up on the street surface are even more disgusting; in the extremely poor sanitary conditions, it provides a breeding ground for the breeding of the Black Death.
It wasn't until 1894, more than 200 years later, that the deadly pathogen of the Black Death, Y. pestis, was discovered, thus unraveling the chain of transmission of the plague.
This wave of outbreaks first caused rats to contract the plague under extremely poor sanitary conditions, and then fleas sucked the blood of rodents infected with the plague, such as rats, and then bit people, and finally led to the growth of the Black Death and the transmission between people.
Due to the medical level and conditions at that time, people had no other way to prevent and treat the Black Death, but to isolate the epidemic area and the sick, and to fight the plague by preventing cross-infection and the patient's own resistance.
And this method of isolation, even in the modern era where the medical level is highly developed, especially in the modern era of the new crown epidemic, is often used.
Therefore, in real life, we must not only understand the closure and isolation measures, but also actively cooperate with the epidemic prevention work, and strive to defeat the epidemic as soon as possible.