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Assessing the Damage

The diablovirus pandemic hit a world psychologically unprepared for such enormous death tolls. In the century since the Spanish Flu, medical advances such as antibiotics, widespread vaccination, and public health measures such as greater sanitation and improved sewage disposal led to an attitude that such events were henceforth a thing of the past. Humanity had disease under control, and while there might be localized epidemics as familiar viruses mutated to spread more widely, no disease would ever cut such a wide swath through the population.

As a result of this psychological shift, the earliest signs of the severity of the diablovirus were often overlooked or minimized. Stories of high death tolls in the back country of several Asian nations were chalked up to poor sanitation procedures allowing rapid spread. Even when the reports came in of entire villages being found empty, many commentators assumed that the inhabitants had simply decamped in search of treatment, rather than lying unburied in the beds in which they died from want of healthy people to proivide even supportive care for them.

Even when the Maydays started coming in from the Gloriana and other cruise ships, many people assumed that the high numbers of sick and dying were simply the result of so many people being packed into a relatively small space. Furthermore, many of the passengers would be older, often with various chronic conditions that could be managed with medical care, but which compromised their ability to fight off an illness. While the losses were regrettable, they were not seen as anything presaging any great danger for the general population.

It was only when the outbreaks began to move beyond obviously vulnerable groups and started hitting large numbers of people in the prime of life that mindsets began to change. Finally people at all levels from senior decision-makers to ordinary workers had to confront the idea that no, modern medical science did not have epidemic disease under control, and yes, modern civilization could be confronted with a disease that swept through it like fire through dry grass upon the steppe.

Even then, it was some time before the gravity of the consequences began to sink through, particularly in relation to the vulnerabilities of a highly-interdependent society to cascading failures as the loss of so many critical workers brought the Just In Time system to a halt.

—- NV Grigorenko, “The Diablovirus Pandemic as a Game-changer” in History and Psychology, Fall 2028.