You don't have to be a bridge player to understand the phrase "let's review the bidding"
OK OK OK… Let’s say for the sake of argument you’re writing a novel and you just read Stephen Kings “The Stand”, and you want To update the plot from 1980 to 2020. You know 40 years is a long time and much has changed, yet unfortunately much has stayed the same.
So… Here’s the thesis: A virus emerges which has the following properties: it is first and foremost extremely contagious and to make things even worse, it has a two week or more latency. And during this time, a carrier is unaware of having a disease caused by the virus; the symptoms of the disease are highly varied and manifest themselves differently in individuals, So unlike the flu or the common cold or even Ebola, The onset, that is the prodromal symptoms, are very different depending upon the individual who is going to be so sick. To complicate matters, the symptoms are somewhat atypical: loss of taste and smell, dry cough, fever, joint pains in upper and/or lower extremities, lassitude and exhaustion the extent of which is highly variable depending again upon the individual, and of course moderate to severe to possibly fatal respiratory involvement. Now the evolution of these symptoms and their severity is also variable depending upon the age and susceptibility of the patient. Some may fall ill within two or three days requiring significant therapeutics, or it is possible that it may take a week or Two to get to a point where hospital intervention is required.
Now That the person has been admitted in the hospital, assuming there is room for him or her, the course of treatment must be highly variable as well: pulmonary symptoms are of paramount interest for obvious reasons but other aspects must be assessed and may be extremely dangerous to a vulnerable individual. Clot formation, neurological symptoms, and cardiac symptoms may be superimposed in any combination and the physicians, nurses, and ancillary personnel have no idea in an individual‘s case what the next step is going to Necessarily be. In addition to that, and this is where it gets really tricky, The virus is highly contagious and easily spread among healthcare workers who are the last line of defense in saving a fair percentage of civilization from ruination. The fact is that a hospital is a confined space, with limited room for separation, there are bodily fluids and aerosols everywhere, and the mechanism of disease transmission is still up in the air. Further, there is no doubt that there are only a finite number of people qualified and educated to treat the disease so that any process of illumination of these individuals put a terrible strain on the system and the morbidity and mortality rise as a function of that as well.
To compound matters and make them even worse, there are individuals who have no idea that they are carriers who are spreading this all around and infect many more people than even the average individual does, and that would include children, and Any individual who works in an environment where in they come in to contact with many many people: this would include cashiers, servers and restaurants, people who make changes in tollbooths, and the like.
Now since the novel is being written, a politicization should be superimposed we are in a fair percentage of the population refuses to comply with simple acts which would severely limit the spread of the disease. To further complicate matters, the President of the United States denies this is even happening, that’s negating any and all warnings for, And let’s be conservative in this fashion at least, 35% of the populace. That is a sufficient number to maintain the spread of the disease, particularly in areas in which these people are the majority.
Now for a moment, where would be the best place for this pathogen to arise? Stephen King used a germ warfare military base within the continental United States: more creatively, in this day and age, the virus should be released in a hostile foreign power city in which there are multiple bio warfare laboratories. Plus, the blame for this may be ascribed to the enemy, let’s say for example, The Chinese.
All the while while this is evolving the populace is informed that this is of no consequence, that it is a hoax, that only a few people are suffering from it, that it will magically disappear, and even if it doesn’t magically disappear it’s of no real consequence, but there will be a vaccine created, distributed, and universally administered at a time in the very near future to combat it.
This is an excellent scenario and basis for a novel which, if many people read it, would be beyond the pale of belief. I would sooner believe any and all of the Twilight Zones before I would believe this would be possible within the United States of America in the year 2020.
I would like to add a note of personal privilege. I have spent a lifetime reading detective novels, Spy novels, novels about intricate assassination plot of domestic and foreign leaders, John le Carre novels, and literally dozens if not 100 novels involving the intricacies of fighting the cold war with the Russians, the Chinese, the eastern Europeans, I have watched hundreds of episodes of Mission: Impossible, and not once did anyone come up with a scenario such as this. Most germ warfare scenarios involve Ebola type viruses which destroy whole segments of the population, the prototype of which was Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” written in 1915. For all these hundreds or thousands of scenarios this has never been proffered as one possibility with these attributes, the aspect that the government would deliberately and with malice aforethought deny the existence of something so dreadful and terrible as this. Those who feel that the percentage of death is not worth all this disruption should also realize that people with mild to moderate disease possess lifelong complications involving their cardiovascular and pulmonary systems which will undoubtedly shorten many lives, leading to significantly increased morbidity and mortality.
In conclusion in a few years there’s going to be a made for HBO series in which this will all be detailed in painful chronicling, and as with the AIDS virus, those of us who live through it will sit back and say “How stupid were so many people not to realize that this was a form of political genocide?”
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