by John Ringo
(Oh, serious technical note. The bird binding sites are referred to as alpha 2,3. Human lung receptors are alpha 2,6.)
What caused the pandemic was a switch in one little gene code. That permitted the flu to bind to the proteins in the lungs.
Which was a good thing. A "normal" flu that bound to the upper respiratory system with the same lethality as H5N1 would have been truly a world killer. What kept a lot of people alive was they just never caught the flu. Because it had to get all the way into the lungs. That required a much higher viral load.
Which gets to social distance.
Everyone knows what social distance is. "I need my space." In the U.S. it's about two and a half to three feet. Anyone who is "non-intimate" (which doesn't mean just family/lovers, get to that) coming inside that space causes a social reaction. People back up or a fight breaks out. I need my space.
Every society has a social distance. But "classic" Americans (white, black, you name it, but fully assimilated) have the largest social space on the planet. Arab social space is about sixteen inches. When they're just moving around. If it's crowded it can drop to ten or even in contact with no social issues. Asians (Orientals for the non-PC) are even closer. Standard is around ten. Africans even work closer than Americans. We're very stand-offish people. Germans get closer to each other than Americans and we probably got the social meme from the Germans.
Heavy viral load requires you to breathe somebody else's breath. In general, people don't do that much in the U.S. In Asian societies it's just everyday living.
The "in general" gets to "intimate contact." Intimate contact is getting down to less than arm's distance. People go "ain't happening" but it happens with several categories of jobs. Medical profession and early elementary teachers (K–4 more or less) being the top two. Kids, for that matter, get much closer to each other than adults do.
Guess which professions had the highest infection rates?
Probably one of the reasons that Americans just didn't infect as much as other societies is that we're grouchy, touchy SOBs. For that matter, it may be why some of the more "socially prominent" zones (San Francisco) got hit so hard. People were "accepting" of entrance to their personal space and it killed them.
The last factor is back to trust. Thought that was a big sideline, didn't you?
Let's go back to our standard family of four living in a house with a white picket fence. Mom's a teacher, dad works for a local gas distribution center and the kids are, well, kids. For this narrative we will make them twelve and nine, boy and girl respectively.
This is about to get . . . Well, those of you who were that family, you know where this is going. This isn't going to be your narrative, but most of you lived one like it.
The Plague is definitely spreading. Mommy and Daddy decide that they're going to sit it out with what they have in the house. They'd had a bad ice storm a while back and they have some preparedness. Daddy makes one more run to the store and the gas lines. He finally finds what they desperately need and comes home.
Doesn't matter. Daddy didn't bring the Plague into the house, Mommy did. She got it from one of her Hispanic kids who barely had the sniffles. She doesn't know it.
The nine year old shows the first frank symptoms. They all put on dust masks Daddy usually uses for painting and go to the doctor. The office is overrun. They do wait, probably two hours, to see a nurse. The nurse administers (at the doctor's orders as he shouts them down the corridor) an antiviral to all four. It's probably pissing in the wind but it's the best that you can do with a virus. The doctor doesn't have any immunizations; they went bad waiting for someone to figure out what to do with them. They are also given an antibiotic shot and a bottle of antibiotics for each of them. This is for the pneumonic stage so that there's a chance secondaries won't kill them. They're told the hospital is overloaded. Don't bother.
They go home. They hold hands. They watch TV. They get sick and then they get sicker. Mommy and Daddy take care of the children as well as they can until they are at the point of collapse then lie in bed to wait it out. There's a box of bottled water in every room and that's about all they can do.
They go through the pneumonic stage. Mommy and Daddy come out of it at about the same time. They check the children and make sure they're taking their antibiotics. The kids are both alive, thank God.
They relapse, almost at the same time. Mommy doesn't remember much of that period except shouting at her husband to stop screaming.
Mommy wakes up covered in sweat but clear-headed. Her husband is dead by her side. She finds her children in the kitchen eating cereal; the only thing they know how to make. There is no power and the water runs for a moment then stops. She hugs her children and tells them that Daddy has gone up to heaven. The children are shell-shocked. They know Daddy is dead. And he said bad things to them before he died. So did Mommy. They're terrified but she comforts them as well as she can and gets them something better to eat. That, at the moment, is the most she can do.
Mommy tells the children to go out in the front yard and not to come in the back yard or the house until she tells them. Weak, dehydrated and just recovered from a killer illness, she nonetheless drags her late husband's heavy body into the backyard. There she digs a shallow hole and puts him in it, wrapped in the sheet from the bed. It's spring. She looks around the yard and, despite her aching bones and fatigue, picks up the plastic tray filled with pansies that were supposed to eventually ornament a planter on the front porch and arrays them across the tilled earth that is all she has left of her lover, her friend, her mate.
Across the United States there are these small monuments to the horror and glory of the Plague and the response of just everyday people. Flower beds across our God-kissed nation rear up from the bones of the dead, their death bringing new life and beauty into the world they have left.
My father is buried under roses.
Yes, there were the charnel pits. There were the death trucks with their slowly tolling bell. Manned mostly by garbage men in cities they carried away thousands and do so still in places. But when people really grasped how messed up things had become and when they had the land many of their family members ended up in a flower bed.
Personally, I'd have preferred that, wouldn't you?
But then came the next step. What do you do when the world has so clearly come apart? Radio reports indicate that nothing is working, anywhere. The Federal government is telling people to do the best they can until help arrives.
I'll describe later what happened in low trust countries. But this narrative is about the happy suburban family, an environment where societal trust, believe me, is probably the highest it has been in recorded history. People growing up in suburbs just don't know how unusual they are. That "it looks the same all over" is boring as hell but it's a function of high trust.
The U.S. is a strange country. Growing up in it I never realized that, but spending those tours overseas really brought it home. We're just fucking weird.
Alex de Touqueville spoke of this weirdness in his book Democracy in America way back in the 1800s. "Americans, contrary to every other society I have studied, form voluntary random social alliances."
Look, let's drill that down a bit and look at that most American of activities: The Barn Raising.
I know that virtually none of you have ever participated in a barn raising. But everyone knows what I mean. A family in an established commuity that has gotten to the point they can build a barn or need a new one or maybe a new pioneer family that needs a barn puts out the word. There's going to be a barn raising on x day, usually Saturday or Sunday.
People from miles around walk over to the family's farm and work all day raising the barn. Mostly the guys do the heavy work while women work on food. That evening everybody gets together for a party. They sleep out or in the new barn, then walk home the next day to their usual routine.
ONLY HAPPENS IN AMERICA.
Only ever happened in America. It is a purely A
merican invention and is from inconceivable to repugnant to other cultures.
A group of very near strangers in that they are not family or some extended tribe gather together in a "voluntary random social alliance" to aid another family for no direct benefit to themselves. The family that is getting the barn would normally supply some major food and if culturally acceptable and available some form of alcohol. But the people gathering to aid them have access to the same or better. There is a bit of a party afterwards but a social gathering does not pay for a hard day's work. (And raising a barn is a hard day's work.)
The benefit rests solely in the trust that when another family needs aid, the aided family will do their best to provide such aid.
Trust.
Americans form "voluntary random social alliances." Other societies do not. Low trust societies in the U.S. do not. The kumbayas trying to build swings for the neighborhood children assumed the willingness of their "rainbow" neighbors to form a "voluntary random social alliance" for mutual benefit and discovered how rare American are.
In other countries an extended family might gather together to raise the barn or some other major endeavor. But this is not a voluntary random alliance. They turn up because the matriarch or patriarch has ordered it. And family is anything but random societally. (However random it may seem from the inside.)
This leads to the next stage of the narrative of our family. The mother performs an inventory of what they have. She considers heading to the hills. Many did. But most, those that survived and lived in high trust areas, then did something unthinkable in most areas of the world: They set out to help their neighbors.
Note: In many areas of the world, most neighbors would be extended family. In those areas, similar things happened. But they stopped at the level of extended family. From there on out, it became the government's problem. The king is supposed to fix big disasters. Individuals help their family as much as they can and then it's up to the king. The king will tell us what to do.
The mother of this narrative, and it's documented in at least twenty studies that it happened in all "high trust" zones in the United States, then went next door. There she found one of her neighor's children dead, another alive and very nearly psychotic. The child clings to her and she comforts her. Then she suggests that the child go play with her children. Children will recover their feet quickly when given anything orderly and common. The child is marginally functional by the time she goes back to the house. Long-term effects may be high, but right now functional is all that matters.
She returns to the house. In this case the wife is dead and the husband in the last throes of the cerebral portion of the progression. She removes her friend's body from the bed and gives the husband as much support as she can.
Note: One function of the H5N1 is that children rarely suffered from the cerebral infection stage or did so moderately. This was across the board and the clinical rationale is still poorly understood. The hypothesis (unproven) is that kids' bodies, due to growth hormones and such, tended to hold the blood in despite systemic flu. Thus they didn't suffer as much from cerebral and other organic breakdown. No solid clinical data but that's the hypothesis.
Thus, unfortunately, children often broke out of their illness to find dead parents. Kids, keep that in mind when your parents are freaking out if you get a mild fever. The reason you only have one or two grandparents is that your parents found their parents dead of the Plague.
The support helps. One of the secondary mortality effects of H5N1 was often death from dehydration. She manages to get him to swallow some water, to take some analgesics to drop the fever. Perhaps she finds some remaining ice and, over his incoherent protests packs some of the precious substance around him.
She performs an inventory of her neighbor's material. While she is doing so a neighbor from down the street, well ahead of her on the curve, turns up to find out how people are doing.
The neighbor's final fever breaks. She informs him his wife and one child didn't make it and neither did her husband.
Yes, there is a new voluntary association starting to happen. Okay, it's becoming familial fast.
They bury the wife and child. They may rebury the husband deeper. Their children are playing with neighborhood children, recounting their tales of horror this time in whispers and even occasional giggles. Kids jump back fast.
People walk out on the road and look around. They start counting heads. Houses that still haven't suffered from the bug shout for them to stay away. Those who have stay back, not wanting to infect another family. But if one of those families gets sick, neighbors gather to help.
Neighbors gather to help. They bring over bottled water and administer medicines from their own dwindling stores. Larger groups gather and begin to inventory group material and food. A bit of shifting occurs. The female moves into the male's house and now has three children. There is a slight surplus of some food stock because of that. It is offered to others in the community.
Why? There is no benefit. Why minister to the neighbor? There is no fixed benefit. Loot the house? Fixed benefit. Provide your own precious bottled water to a man who may die anyway? Why?
Trust. Trust that when you need help, they will provide that help. That even if there's no policeman watching to make them return the lawn mower they will anyway.
This was not purely a function of the Plague. In every major disaster studied, response of random individuals in first moments was a key factor in initial recovery. "There's never a cop when you need one." By the same token, in a disaster during the first portion of recovery there is never a recovery worker when you need one.
All societies show an initial positive reaction amongst generalized individuals. Yes, there is also looting and scavenging (two different things discussed later.) But the "severe outbreak of violence" generally follows the disaster at long intervals.
However, in "high trust" societies, the "voluntary random response" continues and grows. In "low trust" societies it falters after a short period, usually less than 24 hours. See studies of the Northridge and Kobe quakes "individual persons response" vs. those in Turkey all from near the same time-period. For that matter, find if you can the study of "evacuation response" in New York post-9/11. A purely random and voluntary "Dunkirk" movement of boat and ferry owners evacuated twice the number of people out of New York as the "official" evacuation.
If you're going to be in a disaster, the best place to be is in a high-trust society. And if the disaster is Asian bird flu the best place is a high-trust, standoffish society.
Let's hear it for the red, white and blue and a chorus of badly sung "Star Spangled Banner." Just don't stand too close to me while you're mangling it.
Chapter Seven
Case Studies or the
Grasshopper and the Ant
Was it invariably this clean? No, of course not. In any society there are those who consider trust to be aberrant and stupid. There were those who hoarded and looted even in high trust zones. But, by and large, yes, it was that clean. People gathered together in "voluntary random associations" for mutual support. And it saved our nation.
Case Study: Blackjack, Georgia.
Blackjack was, at the time of the height of the Plague, a town of two thousand in a very small rural county in south Georgia total population of thirty thousand. Counties in Georgia are tiny. I hunted around to find out why and learned it has to do with their charter, which was written right after the Revolutionary War. Basically, the county seat has to be "one half day's ride" from any point in the county. That was so voters (who at the time of the charter had to be middle class to wealthy white males) could ride into town, vote and ride home in one day.
Does any of that matter? Not really for this story. But it made doing studies county by county in Georgia a lot easier, which is why so many case studies of the Plague were done there. Also that the University of Georgia survived with so limited effect.
(Clarke County Health Department was one of those who got i
t right with the immunizations. It didn't hurt that the Tropical and Emerging Diseases Lab at UGA was immediately consulted and gave very professional advice, that was followed, to university, city and county administrators. No fewer than 90% of the students and faculty of UGA survived the H5N1 Plague and an astounding 70% of the residents of not only Clarke but the surrounding five counties. Athens has pretty much become the linchpin of Georgia at this point.)
Blackjack. The county health administrator was not the brightest light in the array nor were any of the other county politicians. Immunizations were not properly stored. They were administered purely by the two (count them, two for thirty thousand people) county health centers. All emergency services personnel, all county workers and administrators were vaccinated before the first local case of H5N1. (A Hispanic as was far too frequently the case.) Studies of the remaining doses indicated that they were probably less than 20% effective anyway. When the Plague hit in earnest, pretty much everyone went down.
When the wave was past, there were the initial voluntary associations. But once you've made sure your neighbors are okay, what do you do? Sit there and wait for the gub'mint to come help? Not hardly, brother.
There were many people in the county who needed assistance beyond just surviving the Plague. The elderly who had survived (a surprising number) needed assistance. Power was out and it was chilly that spring. There was food aplenty for the time being, but it was irregularly spaced. Bodies needed to be buried.
Did the county step up and get things going? After a while. But the next step was another "voluntary random association": Churches.
The preeminent church of Blackjack, as was the case of most areas in the deep south, was the First Baptist Church. The pastor was away on a missionary trip in, of all places, Thailand. Where he and his wife both died. The assistant pastor's narrative is unknown. He apparently took to the hills at the first suggetion of Plague and his whereabouts were unknown to the researchers.