Uganda has discharged eight people after they recovered from Ebola although at least 265 contacts remain under quarantine, its health minister said. The East African country declared an outbreak of the highly infectious and often fatal haemorrhagic disease late last month after one man - a male nurse at the Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala - died.

For the vast majority of people, COVID-19 will be the first and only pandemic of our lifetimes—but for the human race, it’s not the first or the deadliest. In Shakespeare’s time, for example, there was nothing unusual about quarantines and closures of public places during plague outbreaks.