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Sixteen days before the new year's celebrations for the year 3422, an agricultural worker in Shapto comes down with a cough.
spitefic @reality
The farm rotates in other workers to cover for her; they all have to wear masks for the next two weeks, the ones who weren't doing that anyway to address the smell of manure-based fertilizer. Her husband is a personal shopper and can't work from home, so he just spends an hour and a half in the shower in the morning before leaving for work.
It goes away, for her, but her husband catches it; his doesn't go away, but gets steadily worse. Eventually he also has a fever.
The farm extends the mask requirement another week, since she did come back to work one day before he'd gotten it; she stays home with her husband. The kids have already gone home with their school friends since their mom got sick. The eldest has worn out his welcome and goes straight to Grandma's.
Eventually they call in an orange.
The orange shows up wearing enormous amounts of plastic and performs tests!
His fever is hard to manage with medication for that, and the cough is worse, and he's having a little trouble breathing. He does not have...any of the things you can run a battery of tests for. He has some other thing. It's a virus.
WELL FUCK.
The orange emails the building's owner, who tells the property manager. The fire alarm system bleeps twice throughout the whole nineteen stories of residence, though not the stores below, since those don't have shared stairwell access. The orange demands the pocket everything location traces from both husband and wife for the last month.
The farm is informed. They tell their clients the soybean crop will be heavily irradiated this year. The stores the personal shopper visited turn over all their customer records and security camera footage.
The building manager is innundated with panicked requests for deliveries of milk/people's drycleaning/a countertop dishwasher pending repairs on the built-in. Heavily plasticked purples wheel these things in, muttering to each other about how if there were robots they could be delivering robot parts and robots could be delivering countertop dishwashers. All the plastic is bagged as a biohazard in the tent set up at the residential entrance. The shops don't have to close yet but some of them are anyway because no one wants to be near the plastic tent.
The trains leading out of Shapto quit running.
Just shy of a thousand people summon quarantine cars and turn themselves in for a nice vacation at a quarantine hotel. A music festival, a trade show, and a dance class collect on their cancellation insurance out of an abundance of caution. Restaurants stop serving food which isn't heated up immediately before point of sale.
One of the coughs turns out to be totally unrelated and go away after a day. The other guy has the virus, though.
The guy with the unrelated cough can stay out his weeks at the quarantine hotel just in case. Unrelated coughs are still coughs. More people show up at the quarantine hotel. The cancellation insurance place is having a bad year, though fortunately they continue to collect premiums from dozens of cities.
Third patient recovers. Second patient gets sicker. Other people in the city have coughs! Not a statistically irregular number of coughs, but like, any coughs.
Everybody with a cough is taking their nice vacation, though some of them are holing up with instant noodles at home rather than going to the hotel, if they live alone or have a panic room.
Second patient, on a plastic-tented stretcher, is transported to a negative pressure room and given oxygen.
They take a few very careful samples of the virus and send them in self-destruct-capable lockboxes to various labs that study them, wearing, always, lots of plastic.
It is in a family of viruses that have been previously documented. Some of them circulate as colds; some of them are very lethal and quickly squished out.
Everybody in the quarantine hotel hangs out till they've been there a nice safe margin of error, then go home. The trains are held another four days, then released. The municipal public stockpile of antiseptic products is refilled.
"Yes. Different things than you, though, probably. We might run public service announcements, get more places to buy cancellation insurance."
"It could, someday. Makes places in the core of the affected area about a day faster to cancel events, and makes places farther away about thirty percent likelier to."
