

Initially, the internees resist, but when the hoodlums start starving everyone, the women volunteer to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and a series a gang rapes becomes the norm. The hoodlums begin to use force and demand that women have sex with them to receive medicine and food. At first, the hoodlums demand trades of valuables for food, but people soon run out of items to trade. Armed guards begin shooting those who try to escape, and a gang of hoodlums forms that prevents resources from getting to those inside. The delivery of rations becomes more erratic until everyone is unsure of when the next one will be. People sleep in the hallways among excrement, and dead bodies go unburied for days. Those in quarantine experience worsening conditions, and the doctor’s wife, who is immune to the disease, pretends to be blind so she can join the doctor in quarantine. They also decide to move anyone who has had contact with the infected, now known as the “contaminated,” into the same facility.

The government works swiftly to transport all the “infected,” who are now completely blind, to a quarantine facility in an old, rundown insane asylum. When patients start showing up at local hospitals exhibiting the same “dazzling white” blindness, people start to take him more seriously. He tries to report it to the government, which does not initially believe him. The doctor soon realizes he is at the center of an epidemic. The blindness-known as the “white sickness”-spreads to many of those who the first blind man had contact with, including the car thief, a girl wearing dark glasses in the ophthalmologist’s waiting room, and the doctor himself. The next portion of the plot follows the contagion of the disease. After an examination, the doctor tells the first blind man, whose vision has gone completely white, that his eyes are biologically fine. The two take a taxi to the appointment because the Good Samaritan was actually a car thief who stole their car. When the first blind man’s wife gets home and sees her husband’s predicament, she schedules an appointment with an ophthalmologist. A Good Samaritan drives him home-the blind man is now totally dependent on others. The first chapter opens on a traffic jam caused by a man who’s gone suddenly blind. The plot of Blindness follows the onset-and the fallout-of a highly contagious epidemic that causes people to go completely blind.
