The idea of quarantine refers to isolation to prevent the spread of an infectious disease.
Quarantine is a notion that has several uses. Generally, the term is used to name a period of forty days (although, sometimes, it can also be a temporal summary of forty months or forty years ).
Specifically, quarantine is considered to be a concept that began to be used forcefully in the 14th century following the advance of the Black Death . Thus, at that time those who had been infected by it and had managed to survive it was established that they would have to spend forty days in isolation before being able to interact with the rest of the citizens again.
Quarantine throughout history
The most common use of quarantine, however, is associated with the isolation or confinement to which a human being or an animal is confined for health reasons. It is expected that, by being isolated, the living being in question will not infect others and, in this way, an infectious disease will not spread. What must be taken into account is that, despite the name, said isolation can last more or less than forty days.
Throughout history, quarantine has been ordered for various numbers of people in the face of certain epidemics . Quarantine, for example, was put into practice due to the spread of the Black Death and leprosy . Much more recently, quarantines were established to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19 .
After giving birth, the woman must respect a quarantine to recover physically and mentally.
The term applied to the woman who gave birth
At a colloquial level, the word quarantine is a term widely used among parturients. And it is that with it the forty days are defined that every woman, after giving birth, must have to recover physically and mentally after the enormous effort she has made to bring her baby into the world.
Among the most common advice that medical professionals give to women who are in this period are the following:
- They must take daily care of the stitches and sutures they received during childbirth.
- It is advisable that you do not have sexual relations until those forty days have passed, so that your body can fully recover.
- It is important that they take iron, either through certain foods or through medications prescribed by the doctor. And during childbirth they have made a great effort and have lost blood so their blood levels are very low.
- It is also recommended that they take vitamin B, so that the tissues can recover much better and more quickly.
- We must pay attention to what is known as postpartum depression, which must be treated by the relevant professional.
Other uses of the notion of quarantine
Another possibility is that quarantine refers to the forty equal-sized portions into which something can be divided; to a thing made up of forty components or elements ; or any other phenomenon linked to the number forty.
In computing , quarantine is associated with an action carried out by antivirus programs to prevent the files on a computer from becoming infected with a file that is infected with a virus . In this way, the file in question is quarantined and isolated from the others.
"Cuarentena" , finally, is the Latin American title of the American film "Quarantine" . It is a reversal of a Spanish film ( "Rec" ) that shows how a strange infection affects the inhabitants of a building, who are locked in the building and placed in quarantine.