Preparations were already underway at a converted car park in Omaha, Nebraska, only days before the first Covid-19-infected passengers arrived in the United States on a flight from Wuhan. The country's first National Quarantine Unit opened its doors on the brink of a worldwide pandemic, by pure coincidence, following a decade of preparation.

It couldn't have come at a better time. The necessity for such a facility has been discussed in Congress since 9/11, followed by a series of anthrax assaults and the outbreak of SARS, all of which prompted concerns in Congress about the danger of bioterrorism and the growing worldwide threat of infectious diseases.

Omaha, which is approximately halfway between both coasts, proclaimed itself to be the perfect location for separating individuals possibly infected with fatal contagions, and obtained nearly $20 million from the US Department of Health to build a state-of-the-art federal quarantine facility. It was like a high-security, wipe-clean hotel, with negative-pressure en suite rooms equipped with mini-fridges, TVs, and exercise cycles. There was just one problem: there were only 20 beds available.

The facility's cheerful director was enthusiastic about the size when Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley visited it in 2019. Ted Cieslak informed them, "We've gotten by for a long time without any federal quarantine facility." “Yes, it's enough, in my opinion.”

He stated that there aren't many fatal illnesses that are infectious and possibly transmissible before causing symptoms to warrant confinement. Hundreds of individuals potentially infected with a new coronavirus arrived in the US from China a few days later, and the nation was quickly put on lockdown.

Although Cieslak's facility ultimately hosted several guests from the Diamond Princess cruise ship who had tested positive for Covid-19, it was just a droplet in a global wave.

The fate of the Omaha facility is only one of many compelling tales in Manaugh and Twilley's new book, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, which reads like a worldwide safari of humanity's best-laid intentions falling short. Their book, like the renovated parking park, has been a decade in the making and has now been released at the right moment.

Since their 2010 exhibition Landscapes of Quarantine at the Storefront gallery in New York, the duo has visited 15th-century plague hospitals in Venice, descended into a salt mine used for storing nuclear waste in New Mexico, infiltrated Nasa's cleanest rooms, and tracked down a variety of eccentric characters quietly engaged in personal quests to keep the planet safe.

They're in a great position to tell the story, combining the geographical, social, and scientific aspects of medical seclusion into a fun experience. Bldgblog, a blog that acquired a cult following in the 2000s for its sideways look at architecture, exploring the built world through the lenses of geology, crime, sci-fi, warfare, and acoustics, among many other odd niches, earned Manaugh a reputation for uncovering unexpected tales.

Twilley's Edible Geography blog and, more recently, as co-host of the Gastropod podcast, takes a similarly unique approach to food culture, science, and landscapes. Because of their diverse interests, the book jumps about a little, reading like a compilation of pieces from the New Yorker (to which they both write); nevertheless, the structure enables the reader to dip in and out as they want, making their own connections.

The brave pair starts by following in the footsteps of John Howard, an eccentric 18th-century English jail reformer who was similarly fascinated by Europe's network of lazarettos, or quarantine stations – a health infrastructure that was completely missing in Britain at the time. He wanted to see what it was like to be in quarantine, so he boarded a ship with a “foul bill of health” and risked catching an incurable disease on the two-month journey from Smyrna (modern-day zmir on Turkey's west coast) to Venice.

When he arrived in Venice, what was his prize? He described the room as "extremely filthy, full of vermin, and lacking a table, chair, or bed." His overall assessment of Venetian lazaretto administration was that “there is such negligence and corruption in enforcing [the] regulations that the quarantine is rendered almost useless.”

The writers also examine grandiose institutions that were either abandoned before construction or completed long after the danger had passed, in a similar echo of the current rush to build Covid-19 hospitals — many of which were never actually utilized. The magnificent lazaretto at Ancona, for example, was built as a pentagonal panopticon on an artificial island, but the plague had passed by by the time it opened in 1743.

Given that individuals in charge of the facility are dealing with a quarantine timeframe of at least 10,000 years, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico seems to be a similarly dubious endeavor. The half-mile-deep salt mine, which was originally proposed in 1979, took another two decades to complete before receiving its first cargo of radioactive waste — items like clothes, tools, rags, and soil that had been polluted during the manufacture of nuclear bombs.

The aim is for the facility to be fully operational by 2033 (with enough trash to cover 100 basketball courts), at which time it would be permanently closed and the salt will be allowed to fall around the containers, creating a crystalline mausoleum. The question of how to warn future generations about the risks of what lies underneath them is still being debated.

The establishment of a "atomic priesthood" to develop new folklore and myths glorifying the nuclear dangers under the earth is one proposal from the 1980s. Others have proposed a "thornscape" of 50-foot concrete spikes that would send anybody fleeing in fear. Both would pique the interest of any future archaeologist to begin excavating.

A section on the difficulties of interplanetary quarantine is similarly bizarre. Inside Nasa, Manaugh and Twilley encounter a lady with the dreadful job title of Planetary Protection Officer. Her job is to safeguard the whole cosmos from human pollution, or as worldwide planetary protection policy puts it, “all the planets, all the time.”

Her work is "the impossible art of modeling risk when your data is nonexistent but the stakes are existential," as the authors put it. It ultimately boils down to making sure that everything we send into space is spotless — decontaminated, roasted, and sanitized until all traces of territorial biochemistry are gone.

When individuals like Elon Musk launch an unsterilized Tesla into space, it all looks a little pointless. The idea was to bury the astronauts alive beneath a pile of concrete if they returned infected with an extraterrestrial disease, according to a horrific quarantine detail from the first Apollo 11 trip to the moon.

Meeting a group dedicated to researching disinfected mail and visiting a garden dedicated to preserving the world's chocolate supply are among the writers' other excursions, but it is the last, future-focused chapter that is the most frightening. Pandemics, as we've just seen, provide governments the chance to try out monitoring and confinement programs that would otherwise be considered unethical.

The authors envision a future in which smart buildings and linked gadgets allow us to be constantly watched and diagnosed, with the environment responding appropriately. “Your world will simply go into quarantine mode at any time, with the flip of a switch.”

Do you have a fever and are looking for symptoms on the internet? Your internet-connected house may just keep you locked inside.

Thanks to Oliver Wainwright at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.