As we watch the spiralling anxieties and uncertainties spawned by the spread of COVID-19, we see scientists, health care workers and policy makers work to get a handle on the medical and social implications of the new virus.

The news cycle becomes personal as we know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who may have been exposed to the new coronavirus, or – increasingly – as we see our daily life and finances bearing its impact. Thanks to the technologies of trade and travel that have made the world smaller, we feel, and fear, not only the spread of illness, but also its non-medical consequences – the dire effects on global economy, community, political life and tolerance.

French-Algerian novelist and philosopher Albert Camus probed the intertwining of physiological and societal ramifications of pandemic in his 1947 novel, The Plague. Set in the Algerian port city Oran, the novel traces the spread of the bubonic plague and the battle to defeat it. Camus imagines a range of human responses to the epidemic raging in Oran that resonates powerfully with the varied official and popular responses to the current pandemic.

The first impulse of government bureaucrats in The Plague is denial. Their impulse is to squelch the spread of clear and accurate information. But doctors treat patients and see the real life effects of the illness, and refuse to deny reality. The ethics of their profession puts them squarely at odds with the politicos. They work to contain the epidemic by sealing off Oran, to find a treatment for the disease, and to ease the suffering of its victims.

Different from contemporary medical thrillers, Camus’s novel focuses most closely on the human implications of the medical crisis. Some people fight the plague with scientific knowledge, human compassion and a commitment to truth. Others look for comforting explanations for its resurgence and casualties, blaming victims or seeing in it theological meaning. Some figure out ways to turn a profit from the suffering of others and social chaos. Others try to sneak out of the quarantined city, looking to save themselves.

Camus drew on historical material for his novel. The city of Oran had weathered several cholera epidemics, so there were pertinent local narratives. And Europe had endured several pandemic plagues, with devastating consequences. Most notably, the bubonic plague that raged through Europe and Asia in the mid-14th century provided Camus with inspiration.

Known as the Black Death or Black Plague, its fatalities exceeded 25 million. In addition to the lives claimed by the pandemic, thousands of European Jews were scapegoated, massacred by their fellow Europeans who blamed the plague on Jewish conspiracies. Jews were captured and tortured to obtain “confessions” about nefarious Jewish plots to poison Christian Europe. Notable Jewish communities, especially in Germany, were destroyed, and Jewish property confiscated.

Written so soon after the Second World War, The Plague used natural catastrophe as a metaphor for human-wrought catastrophe. The epidemic and its societal consequences stood, first and foremost, for the evils of Nazi Germany. It pointed, as well, to the postwar atrocities of the Soviet Union, something many of Camus’s contemporaries refused to acknowledge.

The novel, published almost three quarters of a century ago, has lasting relevance. It warns us that politically motivated obfuscation endangers us. As the plague spreads in Oran, the narrator realizes that “all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak, and to act, quite clearly.”

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However dire, things must be named and talked about truthfully. Inconvenient facts are not “fake news” to be spun, denied or misdirected. Precisely in times of crisis, individual moral responsibility becomes critical.

Camus’s novel was most prescient not in its contending not simply with the past and present, but in its concern with the future. As the narrator notes, “the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.”