Lent and quarantine have three important things in common. First, the root word for both comes from the Latin quadragesima (translated into modern English as ‘forty’). For Lent, this signifies the forty days before Easter. In the case of a quarantine, quadragesima (or quarantino in Italian) represented the forty days passengers were kept in isolation at Mediterranean ports during the era of the bubonic plague. Historically, we consider this to be the first period of quarantine. Though isolation time now varies, the name remains the same. Second, they are activities completed with a degree of loneliness. Quarantine requires a certain measure of solitude. Despite the boom in online communication, the…