Rather, Bugs as in
I saw this up close a some years ago. My wife's god brother spent a few weeks in Europe. His first stop was to come see my wife and I. He brought back this amazing natural wool sweater and wanted to show us. Of course he had all his required vaccinations so he was protected by whatever was on the sweater, but within 6 hours my wife couldn't stop coughing. We went to the movies to see Forest Gump and had to leave because she couldn't catch her breath. I took her straight from the theater to emergency.
The next evening while she lay on the sofa barely able to lift a spoon of soup, my best friend came by. 24 hours later both he and I were sick. I tried to finish a full day at work but left early to go to the doctor. After a week on all kinds of meds we both finally felt good enough to get up and out. Returning back to work I found that 4 people in the office were now out with this same strange flu like virus. I went back for my check up and guess what? The doctor is out sick. When i finally saw him 2 weeks later he says "What the heck did you bring in my office? that was a rough bug! It took out half my staff." My best friends step father got sick, one or his co workers got sick, god only knows how may people that tried to see Forset Gump despite my wife's incessant coughing that night got sick.
We have talked and joked about that incident, and my best friend sometimes jokingly refers to my wife's god brother as patient zero, but in the back of my mind i have asked myself, what if that virus had been fatal in half the cases? Just one more tick of some genetic sequence and mother nature could have changed the world as I know it.
Now i know I can't go fighting microscopic organisms. But i can think through what supplies I would need to stay quarantined in my house and ride out a contagious and lethal flu epidemic. And after thinking it through, I have adjusted what i keep accordingly.
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