swishnicholson wrote:Good article in the New Yorker on how the early stages of the outbreak were dealt with in Washington and elsewhere
Haven't made it through the full thing yet, but they early stages are filed with the same forebodings of a good horror story.
Certainly not the main point, but an interesting paragraph:
The Epidemic Intelligence Service was founded in 1951, when American troops in Korea began experiencing fevers, aches, vomiting, and fatal hemorrhages. Some three thousand soldiers fell ill, leading military leaders to conclude that Chinese-backed Communists had weaponized bacteria. “The planning of appropriate defensive measures must not be delayed,” an epidemiologist at a new federal agency, the Communicable Disease Center, declared. He proposed a new division, named to evoke the Central Intelligence Agency. But when the first class of E.I.S. officers landed in Korea they found that the fevers were not caused by a crafty enemy. Soldiers, it turned out, had been accidentally consuming rodent feces. In later conflicts, generals were instructed to use thicker food-storage bags and to set more rat traps.
