Camus may well have been writing about the Philippines

 Revisiting Albert Camus's The Plague. 

[Dr. Bernard Rieux] had examined the old man and now was sitting in the middle of the dingy little dining-room. Yes, despite what he had said, he was afraid. He knew that in this suburb alone eight or ten unhappy people, cowering over their buboes, would be awaiting his visit next morning. In only two or three cases had incision of the the buboes caused any improvement. For most of them it would mean going to the hospital, and he knew how poor people feel about hospitals . . . As for the "specially equipped" wards, he knew what they amounted to: two outbuildings from which the other patients had been hastily evacuated, whose windows had been hermetically sealed, and round which a sanitary cordon had been set. The only hope was that the outbreak would die a natural death; it certainly wouldn't be arrested by the measures the authorities had so far devised. (p. 58)