China put 46 million people on lockdown to contain the Wuhan coronavirus. But quarantines throughout history have been riddled with mishaps.

In the United States, quarantines have had a history of targeting immigrants for isolation.

In 1892, a typhus fever epidemic broke out among Russian-Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The local health department took hundreds of immigrants into custody, quarantining them in tents on North Brother Island in the East River.

But non-immigrant New Yorkers who got sick or were suspected of having the disease weren’t removed from their homes or treated with such harsh isolation.

At the turn of the century, authorities in San Francisco targeted Chinese immigrants for quarantine after a man was found dead in the basement of a hotel.

Authorities even “strung rope and barbed wire around a 12-square-block section of Chinatown,” NPR reported, holding Chinese immigrants inside while allowing white residents to evacuate.

This quarantine was lifted after a few days, but some Chinese laborers who were forced into isolation lost their jobs.

Mary Mallon, known historically as “Typhoid Mary” was an Irish immigrant whose cooking caused an outbreak of typhoid fever, a form of salmonella that can be deadly.

Mallon herself was immune to the disease, but when authorities realized that she had initiated the typhoid fever outbreak in the city, she was sentenced for quarantine at North Brother Island for three years.

Upon her release, she told authorities she would never cook for others and risk the spread of disease again. But after breaking that promise in 1915, she was sent back to the island for a lifelong quarantine of 23 more years.

The most severe flu pandemic in recent history killed 50 million people worldwide. About 675,000 Americans died, and during the height of the crisis, nearly every major city made efforts to isolate the infected, cut off public transportation, close down schools, and prevent public gatherings.

While these efforts may have helped the disease from spreading temporarily, millions of people still died, and these methods were largely seen as “hugely socially disruptive,” NPR reported.

In 1944, the US government established a clear understanding of the federal government’s authority to quarantine citizens for the first time.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the Public Health Service was given the right to prevent the “introduction, transmission, and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the United States.”

The CDC still operates under this law to this day.

institute of tropical medecine in June 1989 in Havana, Cuba. (Photo by Raphael GAILLARDE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

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Beginning in 1986, Cuba declared the first cases of HIV/AIDS a public health emergency and began indefinite and mandatory quarantining of all individuals testing positive for HIV, according to PBS.

Patients were quarantined in treatment centers called “sanitariums,” and it wasn’t until 1993 that patients could finally choose to return home after completing an eight-week treatment course.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

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In 1967, the US Centers for Disease Control became the federal agency responsible for executing the nation’s quarantines. During this time, there were 55 quarantine stations in the US, located at “every port, international airport, and major border crossing.”

Reuters

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The SARS coronavirus incited worldwide panic and multiple quarantines throughout the early 2000s. The virus originated in China and became known as “the first pandemic of the 21st century.”

Though the Chinese government took longer to respond to SARS than the Wuhan virus, eventually cities including Beijing issued travel quarantines that affected thousands of people.

But perhaps the most interesting quarantine during the SARS outbreak happened in Canada, where almost 100 people were quarantined for every case in the country. A shocking 30,000 people were confined to hospitals or their homes in Toronto, even though the city had only 250 reported cases.

In 2014, a single man was found dead of the bubonic plague in the Chinese city of Yumen, The Guardian reported at the time.

The city of Yumen — which had a population of 30,000 — was put on lockdown, with four quarantine centers set up for precaution, and 151 people who came into contact with the man were placed into immediate quarantine.

But no other cases of the bubonic plague were confirmed, and after just two days, the quarantine was lifted, NPR reported.

In March 2014, the World Health Organization reported a deadly outbreak of Ebola throughout West Africa. By July, the virus had spread to seven more countries, and quarantines were issued in multiple locations.

The West Point neighborhood of Liberia was supposed to be quarantined for 21 days, the incubation period for the disease, but protests throughout the region ended it halfway through, NPR reported.

In Sierra Leone, people were quarantined for three days, and in the United States, health care workers who may have came in contact with the disease were subject to a 21-day quarantine in a number of states.

By 2016, a total of 28,652 cases of Ebola and 11,325 deaths were reported worldwide.

According to NPR, Doctors Without Borders issued a statement saying: “It has been our experience that lockdowns and quarantines do not help control Ebola, as they end up driving people underground and jeopardizing the trust between people and health providers.”

All US quarantines are under control of the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, a branch of the CDC, which currently has 20 quarantine stations throughout the country.

These stations are located at US ports of entry with the highest amount of international traffic, and operate 24/7.

Health officials screen passengers at airports, and if they identify someone with a highly contagious disease, they can track down anyone that person may have come into contact with so they can quarantine them before the disease spreads.