Businesses started slamming their doors. And it was happening so fast people couldn't begin to understand the effect. The President was dealing with reports that were a day old and during the height of the Plague that was like reading up on Darius the Great.
You know the greatest heroes in all of this? It wasn't the firemen and police and National Guard. It wasn't the guys from the CDC. They were all trying, hard, to stop the Plague and failing miserably. But they were innoculated and so were most of their families, officially or not.
No, it was the teller at the grocery stores. It was the nurses and doctors that opened their doors every morning, not sure how or if they were going to get paid all things considered, and dealt with patients for eighteen or twenty hours before going home to crash and come back and do it all over again. Most of the latter were vaccinated. Many of the truckers and stockers and tellers at the grocery stores weren't. They put on masks and hoped for the best.
Because people had to eat.
And then money started to run short at the same time as inflation hit big-time.
Explanation.
People were only buying what they considered essentials. Basically food and gas so they could drive to the store when they absolutely had to or to the hospital or doctor's office when they knew they had to.
But the distribution system for food and gas was getting shot. People were dying, yes, but even more weren't being heroes. It was a tough call.
Say you're guy working at a local fuel distribution plant. Your wife is, say, a teacher. She's on permanent leave and might or might not be getting paid. You've got two kids. They're both okay. You've got food in the cupboard, enough to carry you for a while. A few weeks at least. Surely by then there will be immunizations, right? There's some money in the bank. Not a lot; you live paycheck to paycheck.
Now, it's morning, there are reports of people dying all over the nation from this flu shit. Your kids are good. You don't want your kids to die. And, hell, you don't want to die.
So do you go to work that morning? And have to interact with a bunch of people?
The choice of most of the people who did get up and go out to try to keep things running was just that. They went out and didn't come back until the majority of the Plague cleared or they died. This was mostly males. Not all, by any stretch. But when it came down to who was going to survive and who die in a family, mommy stayed home and daddy went to work.
And about thirty percent of them died.
Mommy and the kids weren't doing so hot, either. H5N1 had a four day "latency" period. That is, it could sit around for four days waiting to infect someone under normal conditions. It also had a three day period before "first frank symptoms." You didn't sniffle for three days after you had actually picked it up. That combination of damned near a week meant that lots of people picked it up before they ever decided "enough's enough" and went home to hide. And even if family had been hiding before they went home, now everybody had it.
Let me talk a bit about the rest of the world before I get into just what that did to the U.S.
Chapter Six
Daddy Is Under the Roses
H5N1 was spreading, fast, through the world. A few countries tried, hard, to close their borders. Some of them thought they'd done a good job. Cuba slammed the door fast but the sucker got in anyway. Then their "universal health care system" kicked in. Raoul wasn't as stupid as the Chinese; the soldiers he sent out were immunized. But the "universal health care system" in Cuba wasn't anywhere near what it was cracked up to be. If you weren't someone important, say a liberal celebrity licking a dictator's boot, you had to wait and wait for any kind of treatment. And trust levels were, to say the least, low. So when Cuba's patient zeros turned up it was the same problem as Chicago. People ran from the soldiers who weren't all that happy dealing with a plague. And when people went to the hospital because they were afraid they were dying they generally died. And infected everyone around them, some of whom could escape one way or another.
Then the soldiers started deserting and the doctors started deserting, taking as many medications as they could carry with them, and Cuba took right at 60% casualties, primarily among the mid-range of adults. Classic H5N1.
Britain's an island. It's hard to get to Britain if you don't have a plane or a boat. Britain cut off aerial communication with the U.S. when Ching Mao was reported. Didn't matter. A Thai doctor who was a British citizen landed at Heathrow the day prior to Ching's discovery. He had just returned from visiting family in Thailand via India. He landed in India prior to it cutting off contact with Thailand and India still wasn't on the quarantine list.
Two days later, Britain cut off all communication. But by that time it was too late. The doctor and nine other infecteds had spread out across the country. He was in frank symptoms for less than twenty-four hours when Dr. Van realized what he had and reported to his local health clinic. Where, despite being an MD, he had to wait. He'd worn a mask, not wanting to infect anyone else, and was gloved. He told the triage nurse he suspected he had H5N1. That was on the records of admission.
The records also listed his time of speaking to the first person about his condition. It was nine hours later when he was finally examined by the on-call MD who admitted him as a possible H5N1 patient. He was subjected to a battery of anti-viral drugs and put in quarantine while being questioned. He was fully conscious, in the first stage of bird flu. He gave a very comprehensive list of his contacts and had even taken the time in the waiting room to make notes.
During his stay in the waiting room, despite his best efforts, he was later determined to have infected eighteen persons. Total infectants was never quite determined but was believed to be on the order of two hundred.
Two things were important here. The first is that, as with any illness or injury, speed of the response mattered with the Plague. Dr. Van died. Because he is one of the classic cases, there have been many articles written about Dr. Van. He had waited twenty-four hours after showing first symptoms, normal cold and flu symptoms, to go to the medical clinic. When asked why, he admitted he knew he would deal with much hassle and red-tape and hoped it was just a normal flu.
Even an MD didn't want to deal with British Health.
He waited nine hours for treatment. In the U.S., unless you were going to an emergency room with the flu, you weren't going to wait that long. Most people of any economic substance, and many who were on medicare or medicaid, had personal doctors. There were "emergency medical clinics" (Doc-In-The-Box) scattered at random.
From the first reports of H5N1 anyone with a sniffle flooded to their nearest MD. While in some cases there was little to be done, they were all instructed on basic necessities and in most cases pumped with anti-virals. The most effective in original tests, Zanamivir from Glaxo, had, again by the Chinese, been made useless. They'd used it in chicken populations in the years before the Plague and H5N1 had developed a resistance. A newer one, Maxavir, also from Glaxo, had just been distributed. Stocks ran out fast, but people who were treated in the first few hours of frank symptoms, instead of nearly 36 hours after the first sniffle, recovered at a rate of 80%. There was even an over-the-counter medication that increased survival rate if taken immediately on first symptom. Many people started using it as a prophylactic until it ran out and probably caused H5N1 to develop its resistance. But they survived.