The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (44 page)

But it is worth looking at some of the more common scenarios, particularly those that might fit slightly into the framework of the world of The Hunger Games.

PLAGUES AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

If a natural-born plague gripped the Earth, it’s possible that all the major nations and cities would be wiped out, leaving only pockets of people here and there. An evil government could condemn these remnants of a former country to poverty, misery, slavery, and gladiatorial games by use of traditional force. Similarly, if major nations subjected each other to man-imposed biological warfare—that is, a plague purposely set loose upon humanity—the effects could be the same. In the case of the manmade biological warfare, we might assume any evil government and leader that survives has an antidote. The natural-born plague is trickier because it seems less logical that a specific government and its evil authorities would know
beforehand
that a natural plague would break out, and hence, happen to have a supply of antidotes to save their own lives and their loved ones.

Most diseases don’t remain lethal after being transmitted three or four times. Their effects diminish with the age of the virus. However, if a disease constantly mutates from one flu strain to another, it remains deadly long after most other plague germs have lost their potency.

How quickly would the Earth’s population be decimated? For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that each infected person has contact with five other people each day. And, after that, these newly infected five people only meet five people each day. The geometric progression of the infection is therefore:

So in this very simplistic view, in which a person only has contact with five people in a day, by the tenth day, close to 2 million people would die from a plague disease, whether naturally made or created by man. Most likely, the disease would spread even more rapidly.

And by, say, nineteen days into the plague, how many would be dead? 19,073,486,328,125 or in approximate numbers, in nineteen days the plague would have been spread to 19 trillion people, more than enough exposures so that everyone on Earth would have been infected a thousand times over by the plague.

Once a geometric progression starts in earnest, there’s nothing in the world that can stop it, other than nipping the sequence off at one of the early stages. In other words, the plague has to be contained immediately, or it cannot be stopped.

If there’s a secret laboratory somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, and government scientists are working on a deadly strain of flu virus for which no antidote exists, and someone infected with the disease goes home that night, then the world is doomed. Unbelievable as it sounds, it could happen. On a somewhat smaller scale, with a slightly less virulent virus, it already has. More than once.