Everytime I feel like I’m a little disenchanted with reading, I pick up a Stephen King book and feel a little better. In this case, I picked up The Stand. One reason I picked up The Stand is because there’s a graphic novel in the works for it. That caught my eye, and so I got it stuck in mind to make sure I read the book.
I’m about 100 or so pages into it, and I have to say that it’s a damn frightening book. Sure, it’s obviously going to be a little scary because it’s Stephen King. But I’ve found myself thinking about it after I put it down.
For those not familiar with what it’s about, it’s essentially about the end of the world brought on by an extremely horrific strain of the flu developed by the U.S. Army. Typical drug treatments don’t work for it because the virus morphs slightly to counter the medication effects. And it has a 99.4% mortality rate. And it…naturally…spreads like wildfire.
I started thinking about it because it really seems like this is something that could happen. Part of the reason why evolution works is because we’re exposed to things our bodies must learn to fight off and/or adapt to. And if we can’t fight it or adapt to it…well…I suppose it’s a bit like pruning a tree, isn’t it? Survival of the fittest…
Now, I’m not saying that callously; I’m very thankful that we’ve come up with modern medicine to combat things like the flu. But as we’re all aware, virii also adapt. So all of the medication we take all of a sudden is taken into consideration when it comes to Bob the flu virus’s life cycle…hence the reason why we continue to get the flu over and over; it develops into different strains.
And so the nasty germ war continues.
We all know that the flu virus untreated can actually be deadly. By King introducing the fairly obvious yet clever idea of a strain of the flu that actually changes on the fly, you have an very interesting scenario. How does the world react? Or rather, how do you keep the world from reacting and panicking? Where do you go? How do you contain it? Or fix it? If everyone who could possibly fix it is exposed to the virus and dying, it’s not possible.
And so you’re left to let the virus run it’s course naturally, running into the few people that simply are not effected by it…the ‘whole’ remains of what is left of the tree after being pruned, if you will.
A 99.4% mortality rate.
There are 6 billion people on the planet today.
99.4% of that would be 5,964,000,000.
That would leave 36 million people left.
Happy Saturday, all!
