plague-ridden

That was in the days of the first great stampede to the goldfields, when the embryo seaports were as empty as though they were plague-ridden, and every man who had the use of his legs was on the wide bush-track, bound for the north.

The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) chronicles gay life through the liberated 1960s; if White lives long enough, he hopes to complete the series with novels about the frenzied bathhouse ’70s and the plague-ridden ’80s.

There was a saintly minorite, one Fra Cristofero, who came to tend the plague-ridden, and who himself was miraculously preserved from the contagion.