References to the book's title have been made in Michael D. O'Brien's 1999 novel Plague Journal, where the narrator and main character chooses the title to describe the theme of the book (jokingly referring to himself as a modern-day Defoe) and Norman Spinrad's 1995 Journals of the Plague Years, a satirical novel about a sexually transmitted viral disease that cannot be defeated by vaccines,[9] referencing how AIDS was in its earliest days known as "the gay plague".
A comparison of plague-driven behaviour described by Defoe and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is discussed in "Persistent Patterns of Behavior: Two Infectious Disease Outbreaks 350 Years Apart", an article in the journal Economic Inquiry, and also in a commentary in The Guardian.[10][11]
