Post-Plague
From the start there were many similarities between living through the plague in Oran and living through Covid now. The way people refused to believe a disease was actually coming, by extension not introducing enough preventative measures to stop it early on. The sense of longing for their life before the plague, and over time ceasing to be hopeful for the future, as there really wasn't a definite stopping point anybody could come up with. All these things acutely reflected the reality we're all living through, and so even from the beginning I was interested in seeing how the book would portray the end of the Plague, as that is something we unfortunately haven't yet reached with Covid. In Part V, the death rate from the plague begins to drop. Although things are looking somewhat hopeful, people are still wary of expecting the disease to disappear. This is sort of the opposite of what happened in America when we saw cases from the first wave waning....