The Plague and the Pandemic

The Plague shares many parallels with what we have experienced and are currently experiencing in 2020. Just like in the novel, many of us started out believing that nothing substantial was going to happen to us. Initially, we thought it unlikely that the epidemic would reach the US. Some people refused to change their ways in order to avoid being inconvenienced, thinking it was unnecessary. Even now, many people, especially young people, do not believe that Covid is a serious issue. They believe that it is highly unlikely that they would contract it, and if they did, that it would not be a big deal, despite the hundreds of thousands of people who have gotten sick and died. Likewise, the people of Ouran started out thinking that nothing was going to happen to them. They ignored the early signs of the rats and many tried to continue going about the routines of their daily lives. They wanted to go to work, to church, to cafes, and to the store just like we did.

Unlike the novel, where the plague exists only in the town of Ouran, our entire world was affected. Having the whole planet be affected is better in some ways but worse in others. Since everyone around us has been touched by the consequences of the epidemic, there is a certain sense of unity and community shared around the globe. People decorated their windows for people and children going on walks, and my aunt's neighborhood even created a scavenger hunt game that could be seen from outside. She put things in her window even though she doesn't have children of her own. However, the global impact has simultaneously led to us become indifferent to the aftermath of Covid-19. Since every day we are hit with more and more numbers, they can often lose their meaning. "Pandemic fatigue" has set in. People dying in Spain, New York, or even Chicago is a distant concern. People also began to grow numb to the sheer quantity of deaths in The Plague, but people were quite literally dying in the streets. To us, the coronavirus tends to be seen from an outside perspective, rather than experienced firsthand by quite literally everyone. Reading about people dying is a very different experience from actually watching someone die in front of you, as happened in Ouran.