The first day, it was just an item on Carrie's news feed. She was riding to school, taking advantage of the free wi-fi on the bus and the twenty-five minute commute to campus to check up on her social media, and one of her friends posted it to their page with the comment, "Dang, Nebraska! Smooch much?"
Cassie clicked on the link, and an article popped up with the headline, 'New Strain Of Mononucleosis Hits Nebraska Town'. She scrolled down, more because the article was small than because it was interesting. "Valentine, Nebraska," it said, "has recently earned a little unwanted fame due to an outbreak of a new strain of mononucleosis that has affected as many as 1,100 out of its population of 2,737. The town, best known for the special postmarks it places on Valentine's Day envelopes, first began reporting cases last week.
"CDC officials in Atlanta have stated there is no cause for concern-although the strain does appear to be affecting adults who have previously been exposed to the Epstein-Barr virus, the symptoms seem to be relatively mild and mental and physical fatigue are being reported as the most noticeable sign of infection. It seems unlikely, though, that this year people will want a Valentine's Day card that has been licked by one of the residents of this small town."
Cassie chuckled to herself and closed the article without giving it another thought. She distracted herself with cat videos and Internet memes, and when it popped up in her feed again just before she got to campus, she didn't bother looking at it a second time. Valentine, Nebraska was utterly removed from her day-to-day life, fifteen hundred miles away and smaller than the university she attended. It didn't seem like anything there could possibly matter to her.
That didn't stop her from showing the article to Lacey over lunch, when it popped up on her feed again between classes. "Did you see this one, Lace?" she asked. "You're pre-med, I'm sure someone must have forwarded it to you."
Lacey nodded, her face tinged with just a hint of exasperation. "I think I've seen it seven times this morning," she said. "It's all over my timeline." She paused, the hint of a smile breaking across her face. "It's totally going viral." She waggled her eyebrows as her smile broadened. "Get it? Eh? Eh?"
Carrie threw a french fry at her, and steered the conversation to the calculus homework that was due in just under two hours. She put thoughts of Valentine, Nebraska out of her mind for the day.
*****
The fourth day, it was trending on Twitter. "#KissingDisease spreads like wildfire across Nebraska," one tweet said, with a link to an article that said the victim count in Valentine was up to 2,520 confirmed cases and hospitals in six nearby towns had admitted patients with symptoms matching the new strain. The CDC admitted that the new strain appeared to be highly contagious, and advised against 'exchanging saliva' (Cassie snorted at that) with anyone who had traveled through Nebraska in the past four to seven weeks. They continued to insist that there was no cause for alarm, though, as the symptoms of the disease remained mild and there had been no serious cases.
Cassie got to the campus center expecting to find everyone talking about it, but apparently there was a rumor that the Terps were going to fire the women's basketball coach. As it was, only Byron, her lab partner in Chemistry, even mentioned it. "Did you see what the CDC said?" he asked her.
She nodded. "Something about not kissing anyone from Nebraska." She smiled, but he didn't smile back.
"Anyone who's been to Nebraska," he corrected. "In the last four to seven weeks. That's the incubation period for mono. I did a little research online," and Cassie made a personal decision not to roll her eyes at that point, because Byron was one of those guys who was always an expert after five minutes on Wikipedia, "and it says you can be contagious even before displaying symptoms. So you can be infecting people and not even know it."
Cassie nodded, suddenly wishing she cared more about basketball. Byron seemed a little too into this. "Yeah, it's got to be rough for the people who live out there," she said.
Byron put his hands to his temples, then gestured outward explosively. "Don't you get it?" he said melodramatically. "That CDC warning isn't worth shit! All these people from Nebraska have had a month to spread this stuff around, maybe even two, and they've probably given it to people who've given it to other people by now. The CDC is telling people to watch out for everyone who's been to Nebraska, but by now there's a ton of other people who have it and don't even know it!"
"Well, yeah, okay," Cassie said, both because he was probably right and because Byron had a tendency to keep raising his voice until you agreed with him. "But I mean, it's not dangerous, right? I had mono in junior high. You just feel like shit for a few weeks and all you want to do is sleep."
"It's going to have a huge economic impact," Byron said ominously. "I read that it could cost the United States up to two hundred million dollars in lost wages and productivity."
After long moments of internal debate, Carrie asked the question that was bouncing up and down in the front of her head, demanding to be asked. "Where did you read that?"
"There's a whole thread about it on Reddit," he said. Carrie bit her tongue, but he must have seen the look on her face because he said, "There were a lot of people saying that! It wasn't just one guy or anything!"
Carrie decided to ask what Byron thought about the basketball coach.
Later that day, on her way home, she messaged her friend Gena, who'd decided to go to school in Kansas City. "Any sign of mono out your way?" she asked, adding a smiley face at the end just in case Gena had gotten one too many queries like that in the last few days.
"3 or 4," Gena responded after an hour or two. "All in quarantine. No biggie, I don't kiss w/tongue."
Carrie shot her back a ":P" smiley, followed by, "Look out! Kissing monster gonna get U!" That was the last she thought about it that day.
*****
By day seven, CNN had started round-the-clock coverage. Seventeen states were now reporting cases, and the CDC was encouraging anyone who was symptomatic to voluntarily quarantine themselves. "While the disease does appear to be mild," a spokesman said at a press conference that the news networks seemed determined to repeat every twenty minutes, "this is nonetheless a disease that we are taking very seriously. Please make every effort to avoid contact with infected individuals, and if you are infected, please try your best not to spread the disease."
Carrie kept half an eye on the screen as she ate breakfast. She wasn't freaking out or anything-the furthest east anyone had reported a case had been Ohio-but it didn't seem nearly as remote as it had a week ago. As she watched, one of the reporters asked, "Is it true that the chronic fatigue is worse in this strain than in other versions of the Epstein-Barr virus?"
It was a little unnerving to see the CDC spokesman flounder for an answer. "Well, it's-there are some unusual aspects to the way the virus is presenting itself, but..." He looked off-camera for a moment, then back to the assembled reporters. "I'm sorry, but at this time all I can say is that the disease does not pose an increased risk to the public. We are taking all necessary steps and can only reiterate our recommendation to voluntarily quarantine if symptoms present themselves."
Carrie let out a small, worried sigh as she dumped her dishes in the sink and went to the bus station. She felt weirdly exposed, standing in the small shelter next to a handful of other commuters. She knew it was irrational, the same kind of bullshit fear that the media had spread over ebola only with a disease that wasn't fatal or even particularly dangerous, but she still felt kind of creeped out standing really close to a whole bunch of people.
She wasn't alone. The normally crowded bus had several empty seats, and Carrie took one in a mix of gratitude and embarrassment. Clearly, more than a few people had decided to travel in a nice, germ-free car rather than risk mass transit. Starving college students didn't have that option, though, so Carrie hunkered down in her seat and angled her body away from her fellow riders as she opened up her tablet and began to check her feed.
The first thing she saw was a status update from Gena posted a couple of hours ago. "Why is it so hard to get out of bed in the morning?" she posted, along with a picture of a grumpy-looking cat with a caption saying, 'THE ONLY PERSON ALLOWED TO TALK TO ME IS COFFEE'. Carrie let out a tiny chuckle as she clicked the 'Like' button.
The rest of her feed felt reassuringly normal, apart from Byron's tinfoil-hat link to an article claiming that the CDC had quarantined the entire state of Nebraska and was keeping it under wraps with a complete media blackout. She shared it with the comment, "Anyone from Nebraska want to reply to this to prove my crazy friend wrong?" Admittedly, she was going to pay for that later today after Chemistry, but she felt like someone had to be the voice of sanity.
Three stops from campus, Gena posted another status update. "Feel like crap," she said. "Going back to bed. #Hopeitsnothingserious"
Someone on the bus coughed. Carrie couldn't help herself; she flinched.
She spent the rest of the day anxiously checking her social media every chance she got. Gena didn't update, and Carrie's messages to her went unanswered. She'd managed to work herself into a pretty serious panic by the time she met Lacey for a study date over lunch, and it didn't help matters even a little that Lacey was wearing a paper mask over her nose and mouth when she came into the cafeteria.
"Overreact much?" Carrie asked, a little more sarcastically than she'd meant to.
Lacey frowned. Well, she narrowed her eyebrows a little and the shape of her jawline changed. "You don't take pre-med classes, Carrie. If you did, maybe you'd-"
Carrie rolled her eyes, knowing that she was venting a whole bunch of displaced stress right onto her friend and study partner but unable to stop herself. "Oh, I forgot, two years of pre-med has made you the medical expert, right? I don't know why the CDC doesn't just hire you now, since you clearly know more than them about the right precautions to take."
