Did the plague desensitize death?

In the novel plague, we continuously see people going about their daily life to life routines. Although so many around them are dying and eventually they are even quarantined off, you see the behavior that none of this is going on often within the book. Which lead my group to ask the question, is death desensitized by the plague? I would have to answer yes to this question. I think that any time there is tragedy in abundance it is hard to be empathetic and sympathetic to every single death. For example, when I read this book, it put me in the mind of how Chicago is. Literally, every single day there is another murder if not more in Chicago. We see it, sometimes we may comment on how sad it is, but we keep moving on with our lives. We keep living. Gun Violence in Chicago is very much  so like the Plague. I feel that it's safe to say that while a lot of us have been affected by gun violence in Chicago we are becoming desensitized to the large numbers at which people, especially our youth, are being killed. I also would make the assumption that this is true for every society that is experiencing death on a large scale, including the people being affected by the Plague.

WWYD? (Plague)

If I were in the higher ranks of politicians and controlled what the citizens did & did not know, I would definitely hide certain things from them. Like a catastrophic event that was inevitable and unavoidable, I would not inform my citizens of such information. I feel that by allowing so many people to know such horrible news, it would send them into such a chaotic state of mind. I would rather let people live their last moments in a happy space. Once people know that they are going to die they won't think about how they should be valuing this time with their family. They'll be living their lives in a sheer panic which isn't fair to them in my opinion. If it were me in the citizens position, I wouldn't want to know. I would rather go about living my life as if I am oing to continue to live for the next moments versus dying being terrified.