What a 16th-century plague survival guide has in common with COVID-19 advice

Ambulance men of Florence, Italy, carrying a patient on a stretcher while wearing masks to ward off the plague.

Stay six feet apart, no shaking hands, only one person allowed out of the house to do the shopping. Does that sound familiar?

Epidemiology or Treatise on Plague, was written by Italian physician Quinto Tiberio Angelerio in 1588. He wrote the manual six years after an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the Italian port town of Alghero, on the island of Sardinia. He drafted 57 rules for staving off the disease. Some of the measures are still in use today.

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