Taking notes on the apocalypse…

Ten years ago I wrote the following on my World FAQ for Zombie Ranch:

“There’s been a bit of a zombie apocalypse, and as a result many of the major cities were rendered uninhabitable by hordes of flesh-eaters and the human response to them…”

That last bit is the kicker, isn’t it? Humanity as a species has always persevered throughout any number of localized or not-so-localized armageddons, but it can’t be denied that we…

Well, we can get weird.

Take this for example. A literal case of a cure being worse than the (potential) disease:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-updates-iran-dozens-killed-alcohol-poisoning-trying-to-ward-off-virus/

I expect there will be many more instances like this before the scare blows over. Assuming, of course, it does blow over and coronavirus isn’t–at long last–the dreaded Superplague that will wipe us out or at least put a serious crimp in civilization as we know it.

Plague scares the bejeezus out of us, which is why 99% of modern zombie fiction treats the zombie hordes like a viral outbreak (although a virus presenting itself in a form that can be cathartically shotgunned). In fact as I’m writing this blog I’m wearing a free t-shirt I got years back at a convention promoting the H1Z1 computer game, which took the big recent plague scare of that time (the H1N1 “bird flu”) and proposed a mutated strain of it that created hordes of walking dead.

I myself have a morbid curiosity about this stuff, in particular the weirdness I mentioned above. Coronavirus here in the States has so far triggered several declarations of States of Emergency although the amount of verified cases remains relatively small, and if you dig into the news articles the deaths that have occurred seem to mostly still be confined to the elderly and/or health compromised individuals that tend to be the usual victims in any sort of illness lottery.

But on the other hand, I’ve observed both the SARS and H1N1 scares in my lifetime and this feels different… but I still can’t quite get a handle on whether that means coronavirus is going to end up being far more serious than either of those, or it’s because we’re reacting far more–pardon the pun–virulently to its emergence. On Monday the entire nation of Italy announced it was quarantining its population, and that’s a pretty fricking drastic thing to do unless you’re in verifiably bad shape. The States of Emergency in my area are emphasized by the authorities declaring them as being a matter of preparedness, a “better-safe-than-sorry” early mobilization just in case it’s necessary. If we go by Hollywood disaster movies, that would be the point where said authorities argue about whether releasing the news would cause public hysteria, but unlike most of those movies it was decided to trust the public.

So far, any hysteria has been limited. But the weirdness has begun, like people lining up around the block to buy out our Costco wholesale stores’ stocks of toilet paper and bottled water. This isn’t an earthquake or a snowstorm. But people heard of other people making a run on supplies and apparently decided they’d better get in on that before it was too late. Similarly and perhaps more worryingly, our local hospitals have been complaining that they’re running short of face masks because of people buying them up — and gold star if you note that on places like Ebay there are masks currently being sold by private parties at vastly inflated prices. Even Amazon is apparently jacking up hand sanitizer to ludicrous rates.

But nastiest of all on the store front are going to be the “cures” and “preventatives” that at best are snake oil placebos taking advantage of a fearful public and at worst are literally killing people.

So there’s the outbreak, and the response to the outbreak, and while we don’t know yet how bad the virus will get, or how bad it would have gotten without the precautions, it is already having very real effects on the stock market and people’s livelihoods as several big conventions and festivals have been postponed or outright canceled. Emerald City, SXSW, Coachella, the L.A. Times Festival of Books… all major gatherings and all pushed back, which has left certain friends I know dependent on the convention circuit scrambling for alternatives to make ends meet in the meantime.

No word yet on WonderCon, but if it does meet the same fate I’ll be keen to know if my hotel and/or booth costs are refundable. Or maybe by then we’ll be scavenging for scraps in the shattered remains of the Old World. I’m taking notes with interest.

EDIT TO ADD: As of Tuesday evening our first direct “casualty” has occurred in the form of ArtNight Pasadena, which we were scheduled to table at this weekend along with some other local luminaries but has now been postponed indefinitely despite there being no confirmed cases of coronavirus in our area. Not a huge deal for us, but I’m wondering what’s going to happen when someone does actually turn up as a Patient Zero…