Name: Erika Therese O.

De la Torre Schedule: TTPDD 3:00-4:30pm TTh

Inevitable Plague

“Mangamatay ra kitang tanan” or “We will all die, eventually” is a statement that is
jokingly said when undergoing hardships in life. This statement is true and inevitable and when it
is said, it gives one motivation to be free or let go of our worries and do what they love because of
the fact that whatever we do, we will die, eventually. Albert Camus, from his novel, The Plague,
shows to us how the plague or the disease that haunted the fictional modern town, Oran, is a natural
phenomenon and that it has already haunted us since the day we are born, just in different incidents
that we tend overlook leading to thinking that we have a solid future and that we live like we are
immortal. In this essay, the “Plague” in our current time will be discussed and how its presence
enlightens the value of life.

Literally, we are currently living with a plague that has halted our lives since December of
2019 and it is the COVID-19 plague. This disease affected the world with 760,897,555 confirmed
cases and took 6,874,585 deaths from 2019 to 2023 1. This was a really haunting time of our lives
as everything changed so rapidly from being able to freely travel anywhere to being locked down
to our houses to prevent its transmission. With knowing and acknowledging this disease and
experiencing it firsthand, we learned to value our lives by relying on our hobbies to keep us
occupied and not worry about the plague. For example, many tended to home gardening,
exercising, cooking, and more. In addition, we spent more time with our loved ones at home which
is what exactly a line from The Plague that stated, “The one way of making people hang together
2
is to give 'em a spell of the plague.” Some still failed to see it and that they think it is some
scheme by the government to control them and still continued to live as if they will not be affected
by it, until they are. However, according to Camus, figuratively, we are living in a plague all our
lives since the day we were born. The cause of death is constantly looming around us and that
COVID-19 is just one of them and is even not the worst. 1.3 million people die yearly of road

1
WHO, “Who Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard,” World Health Organization (World Health Organization,
March 2023), last modified March 2023, accessed March 16, 2023, https://covid19.who.int/, 1.
2
Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Vintage Books, 1991).
traffic accidents 3. Ten million people die each year of cancer 4
The leading cost of death is
cardiovascular diseases taking away 17.9 million die of cardiovascular diseases every year 5. If we
try to quantify it between the death by Covid-19, we can see that it is not much, unlike death by
cardiovascular diseases and heart attack. It is even not far from death by road traffic accidents. I
do not mean that we should be careless during the pandemic because it does not take as much death
as the other, but that we must acknowledge that there are cause of deaths looming over us and that
we are always closer to it every day and that we should take this as a motivation to live our life in
the present.

The day we are born, is the day we are infected by a plague that looms at us every day of
our lives. By acknowledging it, the statement, “mangamatay ra kitang tanan”, becomes even more
true and haunting that it should change our perspective on how we should live our lives in a way
of living in the present, loving in the present, forgiving in the present, and letting go of the worries
of the uncertain future.

3
WHO, “Road Traffic Injuries,” World Health Organization (World Health Organization, 2018), last modified
2018, accessed March 16, 2023, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries.
4
WHO, “Cancer,” World Health Organization (World Health Organization, n.d.), accessed March 16, 2023,
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer.
5
WHO, “Cardiovascular Diseases,” World Health Organization (World Health Organization, n.d.), accessed March
16, 2023, https://www.who.int/health-topics/cardiovascular-diseases#tab=tab_1.