Delayed Action

    I think that we can all agree that The Plague features quite a few similarities to our present situation. Something that I found particularly interesting was how the authorities remained reluctant to admit that the illness was the plague (despite the evidence shown) and prolonged their actions to try to contain it. On page 50, Dr. Rieux told the group that “there’s a risk that half the population may be wiped out,” yet that does not elicit a true response from the authorities as they still hesitated whether or not what was happening could truly be a plague. At first, they only put up “small official notices…in places where they would not attract much attention” (51). So while they were taking some sort of action, the authorities were very clearly trying to limit the reach of these notices instead of trying to get the public to know what was going on. And these notices merely referred to the plague as a “malignant fever,” which feels like a simplification of the plague (51). I know that they were very hesitant to call it the plague as they did not want to sound the false alarm or even acknowledge that they could be facing a plague in their modern times, but they could have still maybe emphasized the severity of it a bit more. It takes until page 63 for the authorities to “Proclaim a state of plague,” which basically sounds like they’re going to go into some sort of lockdown.

    Now for me, this reminds me of how we later learned in the pandemic that the Trump administration learned of the potential dangers of the coronavirus and really did not implement any regulations in response or inform the public. I’m sure that many of you have seen some of the estimates of how many lives we could have saved if the government had gone into lockdown even just a week earlier. I’m not sure if this will come up later in the book as people look back and think how much different the effects of the plague would have been with a prompter response but it’s an interesting thought. Also, in class we discussed how Oran very much so had a constant routine and schedule to it, so I wonder how they will respond to these new regulations over time. Will they for the most part abide by them and get used to a new normal? Or will they start to rebel over time like some Americans? I definitely can see connections to the beginning of our pandemic and I think it will be interesting how the plague’s later development compares to our experiences.