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And some people thought we had reached the end of history when the Iron Curtain fell. How naive we have been.
You don’t have to go back that far for outbreaks of the plague. It has occurred recently in Algeria as recently as 2003 and Camus wrote about the outbreak in the early 1950s in his novel the Plague (which I am re-reading at the moment). Some of the death scenes are really graphic in the novel.
My father was inoculated for bubonic plague and sent into quarantine because he had been in a port city where a Chinese trawler had pulled into port carrying the plague. And that was in the 1980s.
Comparing what we are going through to a war is off the mark as wars tend to cause people to huddle together – closely. This is much more similar to the plague because it isolates people.
In a quick web search, the London Gazette claims to be the oldest surviving English newspaper, first published on 7 November 1665 as The Oxford Gazette. Before then, there were many pamphlets and broadsides. The definition for 17th century newspapers is that they are published at least once a week.
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