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IT WAS TUESDAY BEFORE anything changed—and then a lot of things changed at once. First, the Surgeon General made the rounds of the morning talk shows. He called it a serious flu outbreak, encouraged people to switch to telecommuting to work if it was possible, to stock up on food and flu supplies this week, to wash their hands often, to wear a mask if they felt the least bit ill and stay home from work or school if they felt under the weather. He did not bring the topic up, but one newsreader asked, “Wouldn’t it be better if people stayed home altogether? I mean, everyone?” The SG hesitated only for a second before saying, “Yes. Every time you leave the house, you run a risk of catching it. And this flu is bad. It can kill.”
It wasn’t nearly enough information, and it wasn’t presented forcefully enough to please Glenn, but it was a beginning. He understood that there were forces in the government that cared much more about the economic impact than the health impact, and they were pressuring the SG. Hell, the national plan listed money as the third of three priorities: save lives, protect infrastructure, and protect the GNP. Glenn suspected that in most minds, that list was turned upside-down, with saving lives coming in third.
So be it. He’d change that attitude if he could, but he couldn’t change it. All he could do was his job, the very best he was able.
An hour later, he was told by Emile that they were stealing Harper from him, as he’d suspected they would, based on his praise of her abilities, for the Atlanta Incident Command Center. A dozen new people arrived from the CDC early in the morning, and he had overlaps of one day for the new people to be trained, and then he lost most of his Atlanta staff, who were also being recalled.
Roy was staying. “Why me?” he asked.
“I suspect they’ll recall me too, eventually, leaving you the lead man on the ground here in New Jersey.”
“Oh. Well, I’m ready for it, boss.”
Glenn wasn’t entirely sure of that, worried that Roy’s tendency to joke and charm might get him into some hot water eventually, but it was likely he’d inherit this team for the short time it would stay here. Everyone would be called on to step up and do more. Glenn would train Roy to his job tomorrow so that the transition, when it came, would go smoothly.
The third thing, or maybe this was a sub-section to the second thing, was that almost all the Phillie people were returning home Wednesday night. Theirs was a much bigger city than Trenton and the flu was already there, even if no one had died of it yet. He felt confident knowing that they’d gained experience here that would serve them well. Maybe they had a chance of slowing down the spread of the flu in Philadelphia before it exploded like it had in Trenton.
Fourth thing, he spent an hour on the phone with the New York City Director of Public Health, whom he knew slightly, as she had begun her career with the CDC. The head of the CDC’s New York office was in on the call too. They were gearing up for the flu hitting them hard, and they already had a few dozen cases.
It was a day full of transitions. It was his eighth day in New Jersey.
Wednesday, his ninth day, was a day of revelations and new understandings. Chanchal had the first piece of news. “The vector is crows. Absolutely no doubt of it. I mean, it might be something else too, of course, but we know the crow has it and is probably spreading it. Corvus brachyrhynchos, the American crow. What we don’t know is everything else—the distribution of the disease in that species, the mortality for them, and where they got it.”
“No, but it’s something.”
“It’s more than something, and once again, you deserve every credit for getting us this much, this quickly.”
“My team gets the credit. Good bunch of people,” he said.
“We’re going on the assumption that excreta, blood, and saliva from crows all transmit the disease to people.”
“Going public with it?”
“We’re debating that. It’s not as if people have a lot of one-on-one contact with crows. The debate is, will we just get a bunch of innocent crows shot by implicating them?”
“That’d be terrific,” he said sarcastically. “It would only spread it faster. You’d have infected people picking up dead ones, or dogs picking them up, and giving the virus a chance to mutate faster by cross-species—” He stopped himself. “Sorry. Preaching to the choir there.”
“That’s okay. It’s my position to not publicize the information about the crows for now. Once this thing has burned through the human population in a first wave is soon enough to mention it, in my opinion. By that time, I doubt people will give a damn. The people left will have a whole lot more to worry about.”
“Okay. Do we need to do anything else here in New Jersey? On the birds?”
“I think Fish and Wildlife is taking over that job. Our vet is coming back in to Atlanta, I believe tonight.”
“Right. Okay, anything else? How are the labs doing on sequencing the bug itself?”
“It’s odd, Glenn. I have samples going to Geneva to confirm the new subclade.” She hesitated. “Until I know more, I hesitate to say more.”
He was curious but knew not to push her. She wasn’t one to theorize aloud. And whatever she was thinking, he doubted it would change what he was doing.
One of the new people came back at the end of the day and made a surprising announcement. “I think I found a super-spreader.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. R nought’s running about five, right? This guy’s individual reproductive number is up to fifteen. So far, fifteen. I think it will go higher, probably double that, before I’m done running down contacts.”
“Good job. Did we miss it?” If his first team missed something a new person had picked up, he wanted to know that.
“No. It didn’t become visible until today. Numbers are still adding up. You want me to focus on the contract tracing for this guy to the exclusion of anything else?”
“Yeah, I do. Anyone else see another super-spreader out there?” There was something called the 20/80 rule, with twenty percent of people infecting eighty percent of the cases. However, it was less of an epidemiological rule and more of a guess. Over all diseases, it might end up holding true, but there were some diseases where super-spreaders were hardly ever seen and others where they were common. The most famous super-spreader in history was Typhoid Mary, never symptomatic herself. SARS went global because of a single super-spreader traveling on jets. Had they not dealt with that disease as quickly as they did, that one man might have infected the whole world, indirectly.
No one else reported a potential super-spreader. “Which hospital is he in?”
“That’s the thing. He never went into a hospital. His symptoms weren’t as bad as most.”
“Hell,” Glenn said. “We need him quarantined—isolated, rather—in case he still is shedding virus all over the place. Hang on, everybody.” This couldn’t wait for the end of the meeting. He made the call to Alverez. The super-spreader needed to be in isolation, at home with guards, or in the hospital in a special room, whichever, and right now, before he infected another two dozen. It was not within the CDC’s power to do it. By law, federal agencies cannot order people to stay at home or to go to a hospital. It had to be done locally, and if the patient refused, either the mayor needed to assign a police team to keep him at home, or the governor of the state had to assign National Guard troops. And even then, they’d probably be looking at a court injunction followed by a lawsuit. But as long as the super-spreader was kept at home for a week before the lawyers got involved and the first injunction came down freeing him, that would be enough of a delay to render him non-contagious.
When he was done explaining all this to Alverez, he looked up to see his staff staring at him. “Good job,” he said again to the investigator who had identified the super-spreader. “Keep me up to date a few times a day on your contact tracing for this guy.”
“Will do.”
Glenn was in bed asleep when the phone call came with the biggest news of the day. Chanchal again.
“Glenn, sorry if I woke you.”
“No problem. What is it?”
“I thought you’d want to know. I really have not been wanting to conclude this, but it’s inescapable now.”
He was able to make an educated guess about why she was calling. “The flu came from a lab?”
“It did. The chance of this particular mutation being natural is, I’d say, one in a million. This bug either came from the Rotterdam experiment or from someone who replicated a piece of it.”
“Who is doing that work? Right now. Anyone in the US?”
“I called Minnesota. They say it’s not them.”
“Anyone else?”
“Not in the U.S.”
“So it could have come in from abroad, accidentally.”
“That, or it was introduced on purpose.”
He didn’t want to think that. “Damn.”
“I hope it was an accidental release from a legitimate lab, ideally one we have control over, and we’ll find out quickly if that’s what it was. Because the other choice, that this is an act of bioterror....”
Glenn said, “I assume Homeland Security knows it’s a possibility.”
“Lorraine is on the phone with them now.”
Glenn checked his phone. It was 1:15 a.m. That alone told him how serious it was, that a phone call was being made to him at this hour. “Who? Who would do this?”
“Not my department, but you know as well as I do, it could be anyone. And it’s probably someone domestic, if history teaches us anything about terrorism. Not that this will stop anyone from throwing rocks at my kids.”
Glenn forgot, for long periods of time, that some of his colleagues were Muslims, or from the Middle East though of other religions than Islam, and that they suffered daily from prejudice he couldn’t imagine as a white man. “I’m sorry,” he said, knowing it to be the pitiful and useless phrase it was.
“It’s not your fault. I should keep them home anyway. The CFR is holding at .78 today, right?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody’s kids should be out on the street in a few days.”
“Has it hit Atlanta yet?”
“No cases reported, but we both know that won’t hold. Are you okay?”
“I am.”
“Taking your temp every day?”
“Of course,” he lied. He’d forgotten today but would do it as soon as he got off the phone.
“I have to go. All hell is breaking loose here.”
“It would be. Thanks for the heads-up. I suppose I shouldn’t tell my staff.”
“No—I’m fairly certain Lorraine won’t want it leaked yet. And I’m sure it will leak, but I’m sure she doesn’t want that leak coming from us. We’ll have to call all the labs, and someone there will talk. The rumors will come soon enough.”
“I know. Goodnight, Chanchal.”
Bioterrorism. If it were that, any chance they had of containing this just flew out the window. It didn’t change the nature of the disease, how it killed, or the mortality rate, but it would spread a second disease in its wake, nearly as dangerous: panic. And there was no vaccination for that.
