Plague: Death was only the beginning! Read Free

progression had reached a frightening stage. Rather than doubling, it was a geometric progression, quickly spreading to more than one hundred people in less than seventy-two hours. Jerry Lee, the deliveryman, had done more than deliver delicious Chinese food. He also had delivered the Black Death to more than fifty people during the course of his shift. Judy and John had spread it to another ten people that evening. Between the apartment complex manager and the ambulance crew, more than twenty additional people had been infected in a matter of hours. Death was now stalking the streets of New York.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
    “Death rides the pale horse.”
    -Revelations - The Bible
     
    Chapter 2
    Infected: 134 – Dead: 1
     
    Sam Winchell was the emergency room attendant the morning that Dr. Dent died on his floor. He carefully gathered up all the disposable equipment that had been used after he had first inventoried it. Stripping the paper sheets from the examining table, he wadded them up in his hands and placed them in a red disposable plastic bag for burning later. He spent several minutes joking with the morgue attendant as Dr. Dent’s body was transferred to a gurney and covered with a sheet so that he could be moved down to the morgue. Because he could not do it himself, Sam assisted the attendant in transferring the body to the gurney. After doing so, he absentmindedly wiped his nose and went back to his work.
    The doctor on the case, Dr. Peter Janzen, was puzzled by the symptoms that Dr. Dent had displayed. And he spent several minutes going over his notes and references to try to determine what the cause of death was. Something about it rang a bell in the back of his mind, and he was determined to follow it through. Even though he had been wearing complete isolation gear, he carefully washed his hands and face just to ensure there was no cross-contamination. It was only after he received notification from the coroner that he realized just how close his brush with death had been.
    It was the hospital coroner, Dr. William Walls, who made the initial determination and he quickly notified the public health service for New York City of its first incident of plague. He described the red bloody sputum that stained the body’s lips. And he took samples about the sputum and the lung tissue for culturing locally as well as preparing a sample to be sent by emergency flight to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. He also wrote in his notes his observations of the lung tissue itself. He described the “Alveolar infiltrates, that was bilateral, that had enveloped in the lower lobes. And he could see that this had been preceded by nodular or patchy lesions. (Hilar lymphadenopathy is sometimes seen.)” Checking his references, he noted that Alveolar infiltrates can also occur with ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). The major clinical clues that should raise suspicion of primary pneumonic plague was the sudden onset, the very rapid progression, and, in the late stage of disease, hemoptysis (coughing up blood).
    Even though it was many hours after the initial contact in the emergency room, he called upstairs and ordered that everyone who came in contact with the patient should immediately be put on tetracycline or ciprofloxacin to eliminate the possibility of infection. And while this is normally the protocol for the bubonic and pneumonic plague, the World Health Organization had already determined that this particular strain from Madagascar was highly drug-resistant and appeared to be mutating.
    In less than an hour, the local public health service sent two doctors to see Dr. Walls to determine the severity of the infection. Having been burned by the Ebola crisis of 2014, they were not going to take a chance of this disease spreading throughout their city. After leaving the hospital, they proceeded to travel to Dr. Dent’s apartment complex to question all the people there. It was