WORLDNET ARCHIVES ADVISORY: the following is an excerpt from a medico-history review article written in a dry, complex style with technical terms.
Title: “Retrospective of the 2043-2044 Amazon Disease Pandemic Hellyear: the rise and fall of a death dealer.”
Author: Xenia C. Diakos, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Copenhagen, Denmark Sector, OmniEuropea.
Source: History and Medicine, vol. 2, no. 1, pp 127-172.
Date of peer-reviewed epublication: 08/11/2051.
[Beginning of excerpt] (…)
The death dealer also becomes a chaos-bringer
By the end of December 2043, frantic disorganization prevailed everywhere.
Hospitals were overrun by the infected and the dying, whereas a continuous stream of new patients showed up at their steps. Such a catastrophic situation was further compounded by an aggravating scarcity of medical supplies and a worsening atrophy of trained medical and paramedical personnel caused by staff abandonment of their posts, out of self-preservation or from fear of becoming infected.
For the same reasons, utilities and services, including news media, were also deteriorating. In between, intermittent waves of looting of stores and warehouses occurred everywhere, as scared people sought to stock up on as many necessities as they could grab for themselves—with police forces rendered impotent to keep order not only on account of their own depletion in numbers from the disease, but also because too many derelict officers joined in the ransacking.
Overwhelmed by the mounting chaos, the unraveling governments of the world faced no choice but to bypass national emergency measures and impose martial law, relying on their disciplined, as well as preemptively biohazard-prepared, armed forces for the containment of the spreading disease and the maintenance of order.
Although the activated armed forces managed to establish and enforce numerous quarantine zones, along with helping beleaguered civilian disaster-management agencies in setting up secure and disease-free refugee camps, the earlier governing failures to ban ground travel had aided and abetted the explosion of fresh A.D. outbreaks that were, by then, occurring at a staggering rate. As a result, the military and relief agencies found themselves unable to efficiently contain the expanding dispersion of A.D.
In addition, the increasing frequency of out-of-control mobs that sought to break out of quarantine zones left the armed forces little choice but to fall back into entrenched positions aimed at preserving established quarantined perimeters, thus leaving them unable to enforce dusk-to-dawn curfews anywhere. Even worse, troves of infected and non-infected people were fleeing new outbreak areas to settle in disease-free areas or to seek succor in the refugee camps: this resulted in countless groups of hapless human beings wandering around the countryside, in addition to furthering P. amazonia’s spread and death count.
The containment threshold had long been passed, and there could be no more denying of the raging tempest’s will to bring ruin upon the world.
... And then came the darkness and its terror
By early January 2044, every country on the planet was under assault by P. amazonia in various degrees of infiltration and deathly blossoming. With mass panic reigning the world over, armed forces struggled with too much on their plate, whereas the collapse of governments was well underway. Through it all, puttering distribution pipelines of victuals were crumpling into non-existence. In between, as garbage and the rotting dead piled up everywhere to aggravate the prevailing unsanitary conditions, oncoming famine had begun to creep in—even more so in the quarantine areas.
From there, the decelerating wheels of civilization found themselves on the brink of coming off their axles, as everything that greased and powered them—food production and delivery, water treatment and dissemination, power generation and distribution, to name but these—underwent catastrophic failure.
And thus, the world dimmed into complete darkness by the end of January 2044: no more television, no more internet, no more phones, and no more light. The formerly globalized and interconnected, light-shining modern world of Homo sapiens sapiens had disintegrated precipitously into a multiplicity of isolated pockets of bereft, scared, angry, hopeless, and ostensibly doomed, Humanity.
Incidentally, it was around that same fateful month when P. amazonia, having already proven its mettle as an implacable foe of H. sapiens sapiens, started to see a sudden expansion of the deathly toll it kept arrogating from Humanity – all thanks to an eager helping hand from the very same humans the microorganism sought to infect and exploit lethally.
With stores emptied by looting, along with foodstuffs and clean water reaching scarcity, famine and dehydration had become persistent companions that gnawed at uninfected people trapped in the quarantine zones. Coupled with the daily sight of the dying and the decomposing dead—whether from A.D., starvation, drinking fouled water, temperature exposure, or overall rampant unsanitary conditions—this led in turn to the inevitable awakening of the raging beast that had been slumbering tamely within every still-enduring human being until then.
Hence, posses and gangs began to war against each other for hoarded victuals, territory, or bigoted tribalism, fighting with anything usable as a weapon. Adding to this blooming ball of violence, pockets of vicious religious fundamentalist enclaves concomitantly budded all over the world with zealot-believers proclaiming themselves as ‘holy warriors’ of their God of upbringing in what they perceived as the ‘Judgement Days’, or ‘End-Times’.
At the same time, and with self-preservation having become the all-encompassing rule, every neighborhood constituted fair game for rampaging pillagers and religious zealots alike. This meant allies regularly turned on allies, neighbors often fought against neighbors, and friends callously betrayed friends. Dwellings were consequently assaulted, vandalized, ransacked, or burned, with those occupants that failed to escape being either massacred or left for dead.
The human condition having devolved to such a bleak state, people would slaughter one another for a recovered can of cocktail Vienna sausages or anything else deemed edible. Deadly clashes over the rampant poaching of farm animals were recurrent. Even cats and dogs wound up hunted down as sustenance worth fighting for; the same applied to any small animal that could be caught—from birds to squirrels, with mice and rats included.
Except for disease-free refugee camps which were victuals-stocked and under military protection, such a state of things proved equally horrific outside of the quarantined areas—thanks largely to roving bands of ferocious raiders busying themselves at ransacking any locale they could reach by vehicle or by foot, when not otherwise engaged in open war against each other, or killing one another through infighting. Some of these marauders even went as far as to assault refugee camps, for all they invariably met defeat in the face of the heavily armed soldiers that defended the enclosed havens. However, such reckless attacks nevertheless put in the crossfire the masses of desperate people awaiting to be screened for admittance into the protected and disease-free sanctuaries, consequently adding further to the Grim Reaper’s tally. And in between, the terrified non-infected dispatched, without hesitation, anyone with the barest of cold-like symptoms.
From there, this widespread barbarism would harvest its substantial share of deaths undeterred during the ensuing two months, only to be equaled by a staunchly competitive P. amazonia. To this effect, instances of cannibalism had grown significantly throughout the world by mid-February.
Thus, the inhumanity carried on unperturbed and unopposed—until very late in the month of March 2044.
The light fights back
Having at last come up with a practical solution to stifle the prevailing barbaric anarchy, what remained of the governments of the world directed their respective military to conscript from the refugee camps every able man and woman, between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five, and train them into deputized militias under their command—with the ultimatum of either accepting the draft or being thrown out, along with family members, if any.
At the same time, those still waiting for admission outside of the refuges were presented with a fast-track entry for themselves and anyone accompanying them, on the strict condition that all those able had to likewise accept being drafted into deputized militias, whereas refusal meant permanent rejection from the protected, disease-free, and victuals-stocked sanctuaries.
(…) [End of excerpt.]
(Continued in Part 3. Read Part 1 here, if you haven't already)
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