"Yes, sorry, brain all over the place today. What outcomes do you expect for what policies, making no comment on whether or not they are good ones?"

"Well, if we don't do anything, probably hundreds of thousands of Cascadians get it, although of course it's very early in the epidemic and my error bars on the R0 estimates are wide. And we have no idea how many people have it, so the infection fatality rate could be anything." 

"Am I right in thinking there's a trade-off there, where the lower the fatality rate is the more people already have it?" Because yikes.

"Yep, although if it's really low it's nothing to worry about really, just a bad flu season."

The number of people ending up in the ICU, would suggest otherwise. Gilead has a bunch more cases now; Cascadia has some new ones too.

The Gileadite CDC talks to the director of the Idaho public health department. The director of the Idaho public health department is in a little bit of hot water about a PSA program with some unfortunate implications and does not at all want to report an epidemic to his superiors. The director of the Idaho public health department suggests that they probably didn't do their tests very well-- after all, no one is allowed to come from Cascadia to Gilead-- and that they shan't be allowed to do any more testing until they're sure it works properly. 

Then it won't be clear to them how many of the people showing up in the hospital unable to breathe are there for usual vs unusual reasons, will it.

The Cascadian CDC gets enough data to pull together a map of the spread, a slightly morbid partial visualization of social networks and coincidental meetings in northern California.