Over the years, Ursula Doorne had done a lot of work with statistics. Modern radio astronomy was just too heavily dependent upon statistical analysis of massive amounts of data for a professional astronomer to not master that subject. And since she’d come up here to the Moon, she’d been involved in analyzing data on projects very far afield from her actual specialties.
However, she’d never looked at any data as disturbing as what had just come in from Schirrasburg’s Medlab. What Tanner had told her was scuttlebutt, rumint, hearsay. But the numbers scrolling across the screen before her were the course of illness for one after another human being.
No, she was not going to have Spruance Del Curtin sanitize this data for analysis. That kid was just too damned perceptive, and he had the Shepard attitude about working the system.
What really worried her was the simple fact that this was not a random selection of people from a general population, as data from a dirtside hospital would’ve been. You didn’t get up here unless you were fit and healthy, and the mandatory exercise ensured you maintained your fitness. That meant she was working with a much higher health baseline than any data coming from Earth.
The typical epidemic hit hardest among the most vulnerable populations: the very young, the very old, those with pre-existing conditions, and those whose lives were in perpetual disarray. And in the early days of the diablovirus pandemic, anecdotal evidence would seem to have borne that out. She still remembered the human-interest spots on various news stations’ websites about it sweeping through homeless camps, the desperate searches for next-of-kin for deceased who often had only the most tenuous ties to society. And of course the nursing homes — she’d gotten some letters from home about various elderly relatives falling ill, being taken to the hospital, not making it.
In fact, she had gotten an impression that the diablovirus had cut a pretty clean swathe through those parts of the dirtside population Rather like those early villages up in the mountains of Asia, where travelers were reporting nothing but corpses in the houses, and domestic animals wandering the streets and fields.
But a healthy population, mostly in the late-twenties to early-fifties demographics, should not be showing the patterns of deaths and serious illnesses she was seeing — unless the disease itself was one of those statistical outliers that somehow combined high communicability with severe symptoms. Ursula wasn’t by any means an expert on infectuous diseases, but as she understood things, the higher the communicability, the less severe an illness tended to be, for the simple reason that if the disease hit people hard, they didn’t move around as much and spread the disease as far.
Which did not bode well for the other lunar settlements. A single breach of quarantine, a careless moment, could spell disaster.
And she knew as well as anyone that astronauts were still human beings, with the same basic needs and drives as everyone else. Which made it all the more likely that someone, somewhere, would commit just a little rules breach, and it would be just enough.