Our main character is a doctor, so we see the city through his eyes. Set in Algeria, in the 1940s, Camus’ mysterious illness takes inspiration from the bubonic plague, both in the physiological effects of the disease in the form of disgusting boils, pus and fever, and the history of Oran and its previous bubonic plague outbreaks. In this book, the plague of rats precedes a plague of the infectious disease kind. Against this exceedingly negative backdrop, we find ourselves in the midst of a sudden rat population explosion - the rats fill the streets and are in and of themselves a plague of Biblical proportions (recall the 10 plagues of Egypt). Within the first few pages of The Plague we are introduced to a city, Oran, described as a sand-coloured, brutalist, prison-like city with awful weather, locked in by walls on three sides and the ocean on the fourth. Reading Time: 4 minutes What does The Plague teach us about COVID-19?
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