There was one thing to be said for the current situation — it had significantly reduced the level of both accidents and illnesses, simply because people weren’t coming and going as much as normal. In normal times, Barbie Thuc planned on at least two hours for daily rounds, checking on the various patients who were being kept in Medlab for treatment, touching base on emergency and elective visits, and generally making sure she knew where everyone in her department was. Today she’d completed everything in less than an hour.
Of course it helped that they had a generally healthy population. People with major medical issues simply didn’t come up here, although there was your fair number of more minor issues, especially since the Expulsions. A few people with asthma or allergies, a couple of thyroid cases, the sort of stuff that could be kept under control with daily medication — but still required regular office visits, lab tests and the like.
But she wasn’t dealing with the continual whack-a-mole of rhinoviruses, noroviruses and the like. Stuff that wasn’t that dangerous, as long as you weren’t so goddamn hardcore that you ignored it until you ended up in major trouble. Way too many guys thought it was sissy to come in for sick call for “a little sniffle” or a “bit of a stomachache,” and kept going until their oxygen sat was in the low seventies or they weren’t even able to hold down water.
As if it’s just guys. Barbie recalled when she was growing up, how more than one of her classmates’ mothers ended up in the hospital because they just couldn’t spare the time to convalesce and tried to motor through their usual routines because “the house is a mess and the kids need clean clothes” and ended up finally collapsing.
And there were more than a few civilians up here, men and women alike, who were so absorbed in their work that they were apt to ignore their bodies’ desperate signals for help. Probably not as many as you’d get at the average research university — she’d heard some stories of people going thirty and forty hours without sleep when they were hard on the tail of a solution to something they’d been struggling with for years — but Linnea down at Fitness had caught more than a few coming in for their mandatory exercise “looking downright peaked” and ordered them to report to Medlab.
But she just wasn’t seeing it right now. She had a good idea of the reason: your typical pre-flight quarantine procedures for people coming up here from Earth leaked like a sieve. Not just the obvious problems like space tourists slipping out of their quarantine quarters for a quick visit to a bar, but also the ones people didn’t really think about, like employees who had contact with the people in quarantine, but then went home every evening. Every one of them was a potential vector of disease transmission, especially the mild but annoying ones that didn’t make you sick until several days after you started shedding virus particles.
With all routine travel shut down and essential supplies being transported with minimal contact between personnel on each spacecraft, that line of disease transmission had been closed off. On the other hand, she’d gladly take dealing with an outbreak of the sniffles or the pukes rather than having to watch helplessly from up here as a pandemic gutted the mother-world.
Especially now that the horrific stream of reports was lessening — and she had a dreadful feeling that it wasn’t a matter of things getting better. Instead, information was becoming more fragmentary, with whole areas no longer reporting. She hardly bothered to do more than skim the WHO reports, they were so scanty that they gave her no idea of what was actually going on out there.
US sources were better, although civilian ones like the CDC were a lot shakier than the military ones. But it was pretty clear that people were having to do a lot of patching and jury-rigging to keep things running as supplies were exhausted, spares ran out, and short-staffing was the norm.
They’re learning to make do like we have to all the time.
But one thought kept gnawing at her: what would be left when all of this was over? It would end eventually — all pandemics eventually ran out of susceptible people and burned themselves out. But there was a limit to how many people, especially highly-skilled critical workers but even just able bodies to do basic but essential tasks, a society could lose and keep functioning without having to fall back to a lower state of complexity.
We could end up in a situation where the lunar settlements have to send aid to Earth to get everyone back on their feet.