corona and plague

“What I know for sure is that everyone carries the plague within them. Because no one in the world is immune from that damage.” Doctor Rieux’s words from Camus’ The Plague.

A long time ago, when I was in high school, I would read random novels without direction.

Perhaps, if those times were the same as today, I would have been immersed in shorts or webtoons rather than reading books.

To escape from late adolescence and the gloomy reality, the sea of ​​imagination called novels was a good means of forgetting reality even for a moment.

At that time, the content of Festra’s novel was only perceived as a depiction of a group of people from a bygone era.

The disease vaguely called plague was an epidemic that swept through Europe in the Middle Ages.

Then, when I was in the military and working on the front lines, I heard a story that was going around like a joke and vaguely thought, ‘Is that so?’

Although it is not a very glorious scientific name, the virus name for the epidemic hemorrhagic fever that occurs in the area north of the Han River is ‘Hantavirus’. It is a scientific name given because it appears in the Hantangang River basin.

There was a joke going around in the military that there were two cases where helicopters took off on the front lines.

The first is that a corps commander appears, and the second is that a patient with epidemic hemorrhagic fever has occurred in a unit on the front line.

It is similar to the plague in that it is transmitted through the respiratory tract and is related to field rats.

The fatality rate is as high as the plague.

I was reminded of a book called The Plague, which had been forgotten, while experiencing it in the center of the coronavirus.

Re-reading the plague at my child’s school’s book discussion meeting brought back memories of times gone by, and the re-reading of the plague depicted groups of people mired in a mass epidemic so vividly that it wouldn’t be strange to change the name of the book to Corona.

Those who fight, those who try to run away, those who do not believe, and those who come up with conspiracy theories.

It all begins with a group of dying rats vomiting blood, and at the end of the book, vividly alive rats appear, symbolically indicating that the plague is over.

If you think about it, it was the same with the coronavirus that we have experienced for a long time and that still exists.

Those who fight, those who try to run away, those who do not believe, and those who come up with conspiracy theories.

However, we do not know what caused it all to be changed to the word ‘with corona’.

It is not clear to say that a vaccine was developed and a large number of people were vaccinated and defeated the coronavirus.

The side effects of the vaccine or the modified new coronavirus were appearing.

Of course, it is true that vectorial contagiousness has been reduced to some extent due to the desperate struggle of so many people against the disease.

However, there are many cases where patients with common diseases that could have been fully treated have died due to missing the golden time due to extreme social restrictions and strict biosecurity measures, such as those in the novel Plague.

Because I am also one of those cases where I suffered such damage.

When humans are exposed to unpredictable natural disasters, they make political choices for the benefit of the majority, even if it means sacrificing the minority.

This is especially true in situations where resistance is almost meaningless, such as a flooding tsunami.

When a river passing through a large city is on the verge of overflowing due to heavy rain, the decision is made to burst the embankment upstream, even if it means causing great damage to the residents of the area.

In this situation, words like ‘humanity’ or ‘justice’ are meaningless.

We know that quite a few things actually happened like that.

If you look only at the results, the attempts to solve the problem in such a reckless way lacked evidence and the results often did not turn out as expected.

In the novel called The Plague, Camus depicts the struggle of people trying to go from despair to hope and all kinds of groups, but at the end, he added the process of even people who fought the plague with different actions dying in vain.

Was it a cynical view that disaster had no definition, cause, probability, or inevitability?

The ‘plague’ that everyone had came, and the plague hid in the crowd again without any clear cause-and-effect relationship.

Did he want to say that such a disaster is ‘force majeure’?

Did it mean to live a life that sincerely enjoys the health of the present rather than worrying about the unpredictable and irresistible future?

“In fact, disaster is something that everyone experiences, but when it falls on our heads, it becomes something difficult to believe. There have been as many plagues as wars in this world. “At the same time, like the plague or war, people were always helpless when something happened.” -From 『The Plague』