Beauty salons like many places nowadays including restaurants, banks and schools around the city are almost empty of people. People are increasingly afraid of going outside. Still, many are trying to continue to maintain their normal schedules. Missy Ross, thirty-two years old, and Lourdes Navarro, forty-years old keep themselves busy tiding up shelves and restocking items in their co-owned Remedy Hair Spa in Harlem.
Misty’s eyes tear up as she talks about the number of her clients who are currently in the hospital. “We’re healers in this community. We make women feel good. I hate to think that I helped spread this terrible thing.”
This “terrible thing” is the mysterious Reenu-You virus that continues to spread through the city, especially in African American and Latino neighborhoods. Its victims suffer with fever, nausea and disfiguring rashes.
Public health officials have recently issued warnings that “No one should administer or use Reenu-You.”
Lourdes says that KrystàlaVox, the company that makes Reenu-You was aggressive in marketing to stylists like her and Missy. “Their salespeople were frankly a little obnoxious. They kept giving us discounted boxes of product. That’s not usually how companies operate, but no warning bells went off.”
While we talk, Missy dons rubber gloves and gathers all the remaining purple colored Reenu-You bottles from her shelf and disposes of them in a giant garbage bag. Centers for Disease Control staff are scheduled to visit here and other salons, gathering all remaining bottles.
“We gave them a chance because we knew the original founder. I met her at a hair show about 20 years ago. She was so inspiring.”
They are talking about Jessica Dupree, a charismatic businesswoman and former head of a powerful and prosperous company. She suffered a heart attack in 1996 and remains unresponsive in a coma.
They feel lucky that they do not have the virus. “We have excellent hygiene here at the spa; we always wear gloves for all our treatments,” Lourdes says.
KrystàlaVox has recently issued a tersely worded statement disavowing any intentional wrong doing related to their product. They have accused the deceased Lynx Dupree, their former employee, as someone who could be responsible for corporate sabotage. They have not provided any evidence of this accusation.
“It’s a shame because it was a good product and everyone wanted it.” Missy adds.
Researchers are rushing to identify a “Patient Zero,” a term used to find the first person that may have the virus. “Reenu-You presents us with a lot of challenges,” Dr. Page said in a recent press conference. He is leading the team of epidemiologists from the CDC. “We have lost a lot of time with the misdiagnosis of the virus. Finding Patient Zero is like identifying a needle in a haystack now as the product was used simultaneously across many cities and we are still trying to determine the incubation time. We don’t have a clear sense of that yet. We think it is anywhere from three days to three months.”
An anonymous source working at Columbia Hospital says, “We were frankly caught off guard and our systems have been overwhelmed with the steady flood of cases. For the level of contagion, we currently don’t have enough biocontainment rooms across the majority of hospitals.”
This source believed that quarantines may be issued to help stop the spread of the virus.
—Jazzmin Bradford, New York Daily News