The kumbaya types didn't trust them because they were so mean to their little brown brothers. Fascists. General societal trust had been totally degraded.
You couldn't get people to agree on how to build a playground. Getting them to work together to fight a killer flu bug was so far beyond the pale it wasn't funny.
The specialists tried. Lord God they tried. The CDC worked around the globe. They knew what they were up against. They just didn't expect it to be this hard in the U.S. They had people that spoke just about every language on Earth but there were families that spoke Martian. They never did track down the snake-head that opened the container until he turned up at the hospital choking up his lungs. None of the Asians were willing to admit there even were such people. They found a few street-people who had been exposed. The other laborers, who had been working side by side with him? Nada. "Day laborers that were gathered on the corner? Which corner? We know nothing of this." They were never even able to track down the contractor until he was sick. And he didn't know any names or addresses.
It's hard to say whether "the rest of the first" could be called Patients Zero or not. The arguments are technical. I've monitored a few of the boards where specialists discuss it and tried to keep up. I'll just call them "the rest of the first."
It started mostly in the immigrant communities. The people traveling legally were stopped at the border and submitted to quarantine. Illegals, however, weren't interested in being stopped.
The Plague hit Mexico actually after it hit in the U.S. At least that was reported. The Mexican Territories were right on the edge of being a failed state back then. No way of knowing if it hit before or after. Didn't really matter. Immigration from Mexico, which had been high, exploded. It couldn't really even be called immigration anymore. Not with the Tijuana Riots and the border attacks in Texas and Arizona. It was an invasion of people desperate to get somewhere they might survive.
And lots of them were infected by the time they crossed the border. On the other side of the border were people willing to transport them to other areas of the U.S. Death crept through the land coughing quietly in the back of thousands of vans and pickup trucks headed for factories that no longer needed their services, farms that were looking at disaster . . .
Seattle, L.A., San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, Cincinnatti?, Atlanta, Houston, Savannah, Indianapolis?, NYC, Boston, Miami . . .
There was no pattern. There was no way to maintain containment.
It was like biological warfare except it wasn't. It was a Plague.
More came from China even until the West Coast ports just said "Enough!" and stopped accepting any shipments from Asia. Not that there were many by that point.
Big problem with saying "Enough!"
China was the United States' number one trading partner. And it wasn't just fold-out hampers you could get for a buck at the Dollar Store. (Remember those?) China supplied most of the raw steel, and a hell of a lot of formed, that U.S. industries used. (Not just because U.S. steel was more expensive but because Chinese was better. Big technical explanation but "trust" me, it was.) They produced parts to go in everything from cars to computers.
There's a really crappy book by Ayn Rand called Atlas Shrugged. It's a snoozer but I was really bored one time on an exercise and struggled all the way through that fucker. The basic premise, though, was simple. A guy who built a widget that was very important to, well, everything it turned out, decided to quit. The guys who took over building the widget didn't build it as well and society fell apart.
Societies are dynamic complex systems. It is not easy to break a society or an economy. You can't do it by missing any one widget. If the guys making the widget, now, don't make it well enough someone will come along who does. And probably better than the original widget maker. That's the whole point of a free-market. Command economy? Maybe. But then the KGB will come break down the widget maker's door and explain that he'd better get back to making widgets or he's never going to see his daughter again.
And one widget never does it. Ever.
One hundred thousand widgets? All those widgets that are in containers that might or might not contain infectants?
That will break an economy.
Look, our farm used only John Deere. Made in the USA, baby, best damned tractors in the world.
The wiring harness was assembled by slave labor in the good old People's Republic of China.
So were a bunch of other parts. The steel was Chinese. (Because it beat U.S. steel hands down.) They made the injectors for the engine in the U.S. It was Chinese material. They made the stanchions for the suspension in the U.S. The steel was Chinese. The computer chip that ran the engine? Taiwan, which fell about as fast.
If there had been time, if there had been warning, if the whole fucking world hadn't come apart, companies would have reacted, adapted and overcome. Many of them did in spite of everything. Things never really got to the point of complete Armageddon in the U.S. in most areas. (L.A. is an extreme example but Chicago was nearly as bad. Especially after the winter of 2019–2020. Actually might have been worse. Most of L.A. left rather than died. They're still finding bodies in Chicago.)
Forget a machine with sand in the gears. The economy of the U.S. had often been called the Turbine of the World. It sure came apart like one.
Ever seen a big turbine come apart? Think about the same quantity of plastic explosives.
Companies in those days ran on very thin margins and very small inventories. Various reasons. It was economically more efficient. After the changes in the '70s and '80s in the way that companies ran, the marketplace had become cutthroat competitive. There were a bunch of tax laws that pressured for it. Returns were higher. Everything depended on productivity, which was and is higher per man hour in the U.S. than anywhere in the world.
However.
That meant that when a company suddenly had a breakdown, the answer was to rush order whatever they needed. Don't want that parts inventory bogging them down. "Just in time ordering."
Only the parts were made in China. And while a middleman would normally have them, they were sitting in Port of Seattle under quarantine.
And what with the Plague spreading fast in Seattle there weren't any people to clear the container or guys to move it onto a train or even a train engineer to drive the train.
Not to mention that there weren't any more shipments. China was out of the widget business. Cheap hampers were suddenly a thing of the past.
So was the Dollar Store. Walmarts started closing. Whole companies went from "the fourth quarter will be a fully acceptable return period" to "here's your pink slip. I've already got mine" in mere days.
Various states became "reactionary." Technically, it was against the Constitution to close the borders of a state and people said that there was no way to do it.
First of all, by this time most people were trying to interact as little as possible. Even in areas where trust was high, Blue Earth for example, did you trust your neighbor enough to not give your kids the Plague? People, wherever possible, huddled in. Another reason for the economy coming apart so fast was people just stopped going to work. And the American Turbine ran on productivity. Companies kept as few people as possible and worked them hard. One calling in "long term sick-leave" might have worked. Half the work-force calling in was a different kettle of fish.