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StrangerThan -> RE: It's the End of the World as We Know It... (3/28/2011 12:48:35 PM)
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Interesting thread in a lot of ways. I started a story a week or so ago on the same basic premise so I've been thinking about it a lot lately. .
Part of the prologue.
I’m not a doctor. All I can relate is what I heard in the final days. Some of it came from verifiable news sources, some from rumor, some second hand. My intent is not to create the defining document that traces the course of a disease. I am simply telling my part in it. What I saw, what I heard, and what to the best of my knowledge, took place in the weeks and months between June and December in the year 2012.
As far as I know there is no definitive date when the disease mutated and crossed the threshold of human infection. The middle of June is when it came to my attention, in a story that garnered maybe ten seconds on the radio I keep in the back of my shop.The newscaster seemed more interested in the fact that authorities had first believed the death to be a homicide as the corpse was so bloodied and swollen it appeared the man had been beaten to death. After a dramatic pause, he continued with a "Not So!" and relayed that a medical examiner, whose name I cannot remember, had determined the cause of death to be a type of hemorrhagic fever - potentially a form of Hantavirus.
Case closed.
It was a dangerous entity, yes, but a known one. I and the rest of the world moved on, focusing on things closer and more important, like a global economy that still faltered and only seemed to make progress in fitful steps, like the deal of the day on QVC, like which silly celebrity showed her panties again or which had been indicted on a drug charge. To put it bluntly, not many noticed, and even fewer cared.
Over the next six weeks, the disease hit the news again and again, claiming victim after victim. By the end of July, no one was ignoring it. The stories were coming with increasing frequency. Nearly a hundred people had died. The CDC had put together a team and shuttled them down at the request of the Mexican government. There was still no official name for the infection. A newspaper in Mexico City had coined the name La Fiebre, which in English translates simply as The Fever.
The name stuck. The medically inclined were still leaning towards Hantavirus as the agent. A few voices had risen however, that whispered more sinister names in that particular family of pathogens -- names like Marburg and Ebola. Even then, the rest of the world trundled on, paying bills, going to work, casting cautious gazes towards Mexico but mostly ignoring the situation. After all, the problem was in another country and most of us still saw that as separate and containable.
Everyone felt sorry for them. The charities picked up steam as people donated to relief efforts everywhere. It was like the global conscious wanted to do something. Since it couldn’t address the disease directly, the urge vented itself elsewhere.
Oddly enough, tourism didn’t suffer much until the middle of August. Mexico City wasn’t a great vacation spot anyway. It didn’t have the pristine beaches of Cancun, or the night life of Acapulco. People weren’t as insulated from the abject poverty in central Mexico as they were in the tourist destinations and that kept most of them away from the epicenter. Some officials had started calling for border closings, but critics pointed out the fact that as yet, no one outside the country had shown symptoms of the disease. Even though the medical community had started talking in epidemic and pandemic terms, it was still largely seen as a disease relegated to somewhere else.
My understanding is that it went global on September 2nd.. A woman named Erika Jorgensen boarded a US Airways MD-88 on a return trip to Sweden from a tour of Mexico that began on the baja peninsula at Ensenada, and ended at the Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula. She spent a month in the country, visiting a host of cities on a cross-country jaunt between her arrival and departure. Witnesses aboard the plane later described her as flushed and appearing feverish, with a constant cough.
Jorgensen changed planes in Atlanta after a three hour layover, and flew to New York City that same evening where she took a shuttle bus to a Marriot Hotel. She returned to the airport the following morning for a 7am flight to London where she again changed planes and flew home to Denmark. Two days later Jorgensen checked herself into a local hospital. She was dead twenty-two hours later, her symptoms clinically identical to those suffering from the fever in Mexico.
Officials played down the threat of infection at first. A tally of the flight rosters showed that on her flights alone, Ms. Jorgensen came in contact with more than six hundred people. There was no official estimate on the total number she could have infected on her journey home as the air terminals she used processed thousands in the two day period when she was actively traveling.
The next few weeks saw the disease explode, both in Mexico and around in the world. At the point where Jorgensen had left, less than two hundred had perished in Mexico. Over the next two months, nearly three thousand more would die.
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