Faithful blog reader:

As you may recall, I was fortunate enough to have been a zombie extra for the pilot episode of AMC Network's The Walking Dead. 

I have wanted to tell about my experiences, because I had so much fun, but also, with the Dead Week upon us (defined as the celebration of Issue #100 of the comic book, plus the coming of San Diego Comic-Con).  So here, in three parts, is my Diary of a Zombie:  My Experiences as a Zombie on the Set of The Walking Dead.  Parts One and Two will run Thursday, July 12th.  Part three will run Friday, July 13th (get it?  Friday the 13th!). 

Preface

To say that I am a fan of the zombie genre is to say that the Grand Canyon is a pretty rock formation.  I am a massive zombie fan.  As far back as I can recall, the idea of the undead walking has had a great allure to me. I never liked those early, 1940s-era zombie films, though.  White Zombie and the others, with their voodoo mystique, really did not do it for me.

What did do it for me was a 1950’s film, Creature With the Atom Brain.  It had Richard Denning.  It had a Nazi mad scientist in a cool lab.  It had gangsters.  It had dead cops walking!  It had everything a kid with a fertile imagination would want. 

But, as so many others have said over the years, the reinvention of the zombie mythos, served up ghoulishly by George A. Romero, was the coup de grace.  I actually saw Dawn of the Dead before I saw Night of the Living Dead.  I was in Connecticut with my then-girlfriend, and Dawn had just come out.  I became a Romero fan right then and there, for life.

I had the great good fortune to meet Mr. Romero, back in the late 1970s, at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.  He was brought in to lecture and after the event was over, I introduced myself and asked him, among other things, why his protagonists were always black men.  I was fascinated and impressed that Romero would cast such good young black actors in those pivotal roles.  He shrugged and said, essentially, that he had no answer.  I respected that, and I know his answer to that question today is much more thought-out and refined, and countless articles and blogs have been written about that question.  I still like his personal response to me the best. 

Zombie fans will go to great lengths to find material to watch and read.  We are a very forgiving lot, and we will sit through absolute drivel to try and find diamonds in the rough.  And those diamonds are rare:  Shock Waves, filmed around Miami with underwater Nazi zombies; the Fulci Italian zombie movies, always enjoyable; and a few others.  But there have been quite a few stinkers too!  My video library is stocked with zombie cinema that did not quite make the cut.

I also used to collect comic books when I was a kid.  I had to sell off quite a collection when my family moved in 1970.  I tried to restart those collections twice in the 1980s, but it was not until I read Watchmen two years ago (in preparation for watching the movie) that I dove headfirst back into comics. 

And that was when I found The Walking Dead.  It truly was comics love at first sight.  “The zombie movie that never ends,” as creator and writer Robert Kirkman calls it.  I started reading where many people now begin their collections:  the Walking Dead Compendium, a gargantuan, 1100-page softcover behemoth covering the first (and most pivotal) 48 issues of the comic.

It was brilliant.  It was a revelation. And, like all great zombie fiction (whether written or filmed), it is all about the survivors – not the zombies – that makes great zombie entertainment.  And Kirkman makes us care about survivors like no other.  He makes us like them, and then he kills them!

Shortly afterward, I learned of the planned adaptation of the comic books to television. 

And so it was that, one morning in May of 2010, my deputy CIO, Lauren Perlman, came into my office at the House of Representatives. 

“A good friend of mine just got hired as an important member of the crew for a new series AMC was shooting,” she said.  “Something called: ‘ The Walking Dead’.”

“THE WALKING DEAD?!?!?!”  I shouted.  “THE WALKING DEAD?”   I said, “Lauren, I have got to be a zombie on that show!” 

Roughly two weeks later, I got a call from Patrick of Extras Casting Atlanta, the go-to casting agency for television and film production in Georgia.  Think Zombieland.  The Crazies.  X-Men: First Class.  And The Walking Dead.  Patrick called to get my email address so they could forward the information on where to report for sign-in, along with my date and “call time” when I was due on the set. My shoot was for the weekend of June 12^th and 13^th, 2010.  That was perfect, as it did not interfere with my day job as CIO (that’s head geek) for the Florida House of Representatives. 

As you might imagine, Lauren is now set for life. 

I had never been in a movie before.  My filmmaking experience was confined to watching the filming of a scene for the Chuck Norris film Invasion USA back in the 1980s.  However, because of my different positions over the years in my “day jobs” within politics and government, most recently as an expert in pandemic preparedness (imagine that), I have appeared on television roughly a hundred times.  I have been on NBC News, CNN, Fox News, CBS News, ABC News, and way too many local newscasts to even try to count.  That gave me an appreciation for what I was about to do.

So I entered the situation with a completely blank canvas upon which to paint my recollections and to learn and absorb as much as I could during the two days I was there.

I decided to rent a hotel room as physically close to the shoot as possible.  Even before the casting company had sent my confirming email with map, I had been able to scope out the details of the shoot on the Internet.  I chose the closest hotel to the shoot itself – well, the closest hotel that was not going to cost me an arm and a leg (har!).  That hotel wound up being two blocks from the set as the crow flew, but with the street closures, it still took me about 5 minutes to drive there. 

I arrived in Atlanta that Friday night.  The drive was problematic, as I ran over a shredded recap tread going northbound on I-75, about an hour south of Atlanta.  After pulling off the interstate to inspect the situation, I kept going and pulled into a Truett’s parking lot in the southern suburbs of Atlanta to eat and to make repairs.  The plastic shield underneath the oil pan had been knocked almost completely loose, hanging by a grommet.  Also, one of my fog lights had been pushed in about an inch, but was still functional.  I made emergency repairs, ate at Truett’s (Chick fil-A’s fancier sibling), and pushed onward.

After checking into the hotel, I decided to take a walk.  I got as far as a burned-out bus, guarded by two policemen.  My anticipation grew.  Only my fatigue from the six-hour drive enabled me to sleep that night.

Sharon Sanders and the posters at Flutrackers are reporting some pretty weird events in Hebai Province, China.  First, let's locate Hebei on the map.

 A series of seemingly disassociated events, when viewed at a higher level (as Sharon has done in her Flutracker posts), paints a picture of Hebei as in some sort of state of emergency (my words).  Shops closed by force.  People required to wear masks.  A thousand police officers dispatched to maintain discipline.  And, in the most stark post yet, occupancy at the regional hospital exceeding 100% and an isolation ward erected.

Official (meaning government) reports coming from the region speak of the virus actually being Adenovirus 55, and not the dreaded (and rumored) SARS virus.  We know the Case Fatality Rate from SARS hovered, eventually, around 10% of the sick.  A hospital filled with a thousand sick would produce at least a hundred dead, if the virus were SARS.  Rumors and slim media accounts seem to converge on just one person dead so far.

What we know of Adenovirus 55 is limited, but growing.  A paper that was published in 2009speaks of the first (and until now, last) major outbreak of Ad55.  Ad55 will produce some serious respiratory distress, but blessedly, only one death in 254 infected Chinese students in Shaanxi Province, China.  Here's the map showing the location of Shaanxi:

As you see, Shaanxi is two provinces over from Hebei.  I do not think it would be much of a stretch to say that this entire region may want to re-evaluate all its respiratory distress cases and outbreaks since 2005 to see if Ad55, instead of flu, could be an explanation.

Of course, what fascinates me is that China was able to come up with a positive diagnosis of Ad55 so quickly.  Long-time readers of this Blog (if I still have any!) know that I have been campaigning for testing for Ad14, which has a long and ugly reputation in military bases all over America, and hospitals in the Pacific Northwest.  As the medical report from 2009 attests, a "tsunami" (their words) of genetic information relative to Adenovirus is pouring in to researchers.  Good!  Maybe we will begin to take Adenovirus more seriously. 

In the meantime, it is also interesting to see what lengths the Chinese government will go to try to isolate anything that even remotely resembles SARS.  The government's zeal to prevent or mitigate the spread of an infectious disease is "disconcertingly refreshing."  Feel free to use that phrase.  It is troubling, no doubt, to see government trucks rolling into a province, and that has to evoke bad memories for the residents.  From a global perspective, however, and especially in light of the aftereffects of the film "Contagion," any attempt to contain a pathogen and prevent it from spreading is  appreciated, as long as the actions are 1) justified, 2) non-lethal, and 3) abandoned, once the pathogen is proved to be relatively harmless.

Those of us who have made pandemic preparedness part of our curriculum vitae could not have been more excited about the premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, ““Contagion”.”

 And we were not disappointed.  “Contagion” is a paragon of what an intelligent biological thriller should be:  hyper-accurate, absorbing, and, most of all, a film that reminds us of our own individual responsibilities within a civilized society.

 Not to say that there’s not a little bit of Hollywood in this film.  More on that later.  First, let’s take a look at how the movie was made, the etiology of the fictional virus, and what Hollywood got right.  And in many cases, they got it absolutely right.

What “Contagion” got right 

The MEV-1 virus in the movie is the brainchild of Dr. Ian Lipkin, of Columbia University.  Dr. Lipkin directs the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia.    He was contacted by Soderbergh and the film’s writer, Scott Z. Burns.  He agreed to come on board the production as a paid technical and science adviser.

Dr. Lipkin created a virus for the film that is patterned after an actual virus: The Nipah virus.  Nipah was first discovered in Malaysia in 1999.  The natural reservoir of Nipah is in the Malaysian fruit bat population.  The WHO reports that Nipah has also been found in bat urine and in partially-eaten fruit in the region.  Oh, by the way:  The real-life bats in question are migratory.  Toward that end, antibodies to a virus very similar to Nipah have been found in India, Indonesia and Timor.

There is a danger in making bats the heavy in the film.  Bats are essential in such areas as insect control.  And North American bats are dying by the millions, due to “white-nose syndrome,” a fungal infection that essentially suffocates bats during their annual hibernation. 

But bats are also vectors of some of the world’s most dangerous diseases, especially Ebola – and SARS. 

While the MEV-1 virus is patterned after Nipah, the pattern of infection is modeled after the SARS virus.  How quickly we forget how threatening SARS really was.  In bookstore remainder bins all over the continent, one can find Karl Greenfield’s seminal work on the SARS epidemic, titled, “ China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century's First Great Epidemic.” I highly recommend his book.

While the original vector of SARS in 2002/03 was a “civet cat,” a peculiar-looking mammal, it may be that the civet cat in question was infected by a bat.  SARS virus has been found in Brazilian bats, so the danger is not localized to Southeast Asia by any means.

Had SARS been more like influenza and less like the common cold, we would have seen a pandemic that would have made 1918’s Spanish Flu look like the common cold.  In the US, the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic killed 2.5% of everyone it infected.  In contrast, SARS killed 10% of those it infected, worldwide.  But luckily for us (“us” being the world), SARS infected so quickly, public health professionals got in front of the disease and eventually beat it down.  It is counterintuitive to be sure, but a disease that infects quickly is easier to corral than one with a days-long incubation period, such as influenza.

To go into how SARS infected and killed would also produce those obligatory “SPOILER ALERT!!” warnings and disclosures, which I want to avoid (where possible) in this review.  So suffice it to say that “Contagion” is disturbingly accurate when it comes to how quickly it was able to infect on a global scale.

SARS was not the exclusive province of China, Toronto or Singapore.  Two prominent Tallahassee residents (who I obviously cannot identify for HIPAA reasons) were infected by SARS during a visit to China in 2003.    The CDC and WHO were actually monitoring their health following their return to Tallahassee. By proxy, they were monitoring Tallahassee for signs of SARS infection.

So what Soberbergh, Burns and Lipkin created were a perfect fit of an established disease and historic established routes of transmission.  In other words, extremely realistic.

Dr. Lipkin also taught the cast how to correctly don protective gear, and how to speak the language of disease.

In the movie, the Elliott Gould character, Dr. Ian Sussman (yes, a probable nod to Dr. Ian Lipkin) is able to finally grow a sample of MEV-1 to produce a vaccine candidate.  This storyline parallels the first attempts to grow H5N1 in chicken eggs to produce a vaccine.  Bird flu was killing the eggs.  That was eventually overcome.  Of course, H5N1 poultry vaccines have arguably done more harm than good, but that is a matter left to my previous blogs on the subject.

Elliott Gould’s Dr. Sussman is handling the virus in a Level 3 lab, and the CDC has already ordered all samples not contained in a Level 4 lab to be destroyed by fire.  Dr. Sussman’s on-screen disregard for CDC protocols is reminiscent of the spanking that real-life Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin received in 2007 for handling “copies” of the dreaded Ebola virus in a level-2 lab. 

Laurence Fishburne’s admonition that “We don’t want that virus leaving on the bottom of someone’s shoe” refers to a frequent and ongoing concern.  For more information, refer to my ongoing blog series, “When labs attack.”

What “Contagion” could have done better

Where the movie deviates from probability, in this reviewer’s opinion, is in its depiction of how society would react to the virus.  These deviations are all permitted, because they are clearly possible. It is just in the areas that were left out that very minor – and forgivable – faults can be found.

In less than a month, society pretty much goes over the cliff.  Garbage lies uncollected and strewn about neighborhoods.  Unions strike, rather than perform their duties.  Governors call out the National Guard and seal borders without apparently seeking consultation from Washington.  And while grocery stores are ransacked and food is extremely scarce, the lights and phones somehow stay on.

The Enemy of the People in any pandemic is the stability of the supply chain.  That just-in-time supply chain is the most fragile part of our economy.  The level of global apprehension, not to mention the Case Fatality Rate of the MEV-1 virus in the film, would have produced much more damage to the global supply chain. 

Those of us who are sought-out as experts in pandemic preparedness often point to unions as a cause for concern.  In fact, pandemic planners factor in possible union (in)actions in their calculations, but I believe that people are also capable of doing heroic things.  The public health experts in “Contagion” are justifiably viewed as heroic.  But as we saw on 9/11, and as we were reminded this past weekend, heroism is not limited to one exclusive group of people.

However, the images of public employees such as law enforcement officers abandoning their posts in New Orleans during Katrina – and even joining in the looting and pillaging, in a few cases – is also testament to our individual faults and failings.  That, too, can be seen in “Contagion,” even at the higher levels of the government.

The film did not damage the critical infrastructure enough.  In a prolonged, 1918-type pandemic, we believe ports will clog, phones will become unreliable, and power will come on and off – all because there will not be sufficient levels of people healthy enough to work to maintain them, nor will there be sufficient numbers of people to work, due to absenteeism to take care of loved ones.  And there are always those who will burn sick days just for a headache.  We have estimated that, at the height of a pandemic, as much as a third of the workforce might be absent on any given workday.

The movie attempts to display the deterioration of society in a few select scenes, but the film did not go far enough in its depiction of the degradation of the infrastructure.  It did show the requisite looting of grocery stores, and certain unsettling acts of violence, and it did an excellent job in its frequent shots of uncollected refuse.

In a real-life, lethal pandemic, the military would be called upon to perform these tasks.  That would include the National Guard, which I must believe would be Federalized early on, in order to prevent the types of actions that were undertaken by individual governors as the pandemic worsened.  Federalizing the Guard places those units under the direct control of the Pentagon.  Governors lose their Guard in that scenario.  I would have to believe that the president would exercise that authority very, very early on in this process.

Sealing the borders, for example, has been almost completely tossed as a realistic countermeasure.  The SARS epidemic and the H1N1v “swine flu” pandemic showed how border closures would be ineffective to restrain any virus. 

This point (along with the supply chain issue) was actually done very well in the TV-movie “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America”. In that film, the military is called home from Iraq and Afghanistan to help maintain law and order.  I would expect governors to call all their Guard units home, to assist in stabilizing the infrastructure of their states and to curtail inevitable violence.

 Other than the depiction of labor unions as petty and self-serving, “Contagion” also serves as a confirmation of the Second Amendment during a crisis.  Cops are not around when the shooting starts.  Self-defense is the order of the day.  Being armed equals being safe.  These are two curious messages to be dealt by a Hollywood director, and I found it to be refreshing.

SPOILER ALERTS COMING!

My family felt that it was a little preposterous that key public health people would not continuously wear their masks and gloves, especially in public.  We have had many discussions regarding the efficacy of wearing masks in public, however, and I defer to the writer and director on this topic. 

Another concern (the most deeply-rooted one) is in the film’s conflict between the CDC and the Minneapolis public health unit.  This is where the Hollywood formula kicks in, resembling a Criminal Minds episode where the local cops resent the FBI intrusion into their bidness.  The reality is that local public health units generally work very well with the CDC, and welcome their participation when things go bad.  In my experience, the CDC is a first-rate organization, led by top-flight people.  Local public health units do the best they can do, especially in this current economy, but “overwhelmed” would be an understatement on any given workday – let alone during a pandemic.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, head of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota (and who worked at the Minnesota Department of Health for a quarter-century), alluded to this during a recent “Contagion”-inspired interview.  In fact, the Minnesota Department of Health is one of the best-run departments of its kind in the country.

The other area that the movie (which runs a brisk 106 minutes) glosses over is within the subject  of vaccine production.  Public health experts such as Dr. Osterholm have stated that the movie’s scenario for vaccine production is too rosy (my words).  Vaccine production takes months, even in a “good” viral situation such as producing an influenza vaccine.  It took every bit of six months just to produce the swine flu vaccine. 

With a new and previously-unseen virus, especially considering the repeated failures of the prototypes, it would take considerably longer.  The wait for vaccine could take almost a year, causing further destruction of the global economy and the further erosion of the critical infrastructure.  And this does not even deal with the issue of who gets vaccine and who does not. 

In another “Contagion”-imitates-life example, a Chinese group has kidnapped a WHO official, and demands -- as ransom -- vaccine produced in the West.  This is a nod to the possibility of natively-produced substandard or even counterfeit vaccine.  It is nice to hear someone demanding America vaccine –anything – because it is the best in the world.  Note, at the end of the movie, the architecture of the open-air school housing the Chinese children. 

The vaccine issue is personalized within the village, but once again, the script alludes to larger global issues.  In this case, the rural, poor demand for vaccine speaks to the problems caused by Indonesia in the fight against bird flu.  Back in 2007, the Indonesian government refused to share  human bird flu samples – or even to quickly report human bird flu cases and deaths – simply because they felt their samples would make the global pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars, and, at the end of the day, leave Indonesia without any vaccine.  It took years for the West to negotiate an agreement with Indonesia to give them vaccine in exchange for human bird flu samples.

The movie did do a good job of showing the agony involved with waiting and waiting until their vaccine lottery number was called.  I found the prospect of a “vaccine lottery” to be a curious and interesting (and fair) way to resolve the issue of who got vaccine and when. The reality is, there is a schedule of who gets vaccine, at least within the first responder community, the military and the government.  The Strategic National Stockpile has the goods.  The Department of Homeland Security and state governments have the plans.  After that, I doubt if there is a plan, so the lottery idea seems as fair as any.

Finally, we need to address the issue of the blogger character played by Jude Law.  “Blogging is graffiti with punctuation,” Elliott Gould admonishes Law’s character.  Law’s Alan Krumwiede is the worst sort of blogger, one who is only interested in promoting his “brand” at the expense of the truth, not to mention people’s very lives, by promoting an unproven homeopathic “remedy.”  He is the 21^st Century snake oil salesman, shamelessly hawking an elixir that is eventually proven to be dangerously ineffective. 

Fortunately, I do not know any bloggers personally who would fit into those shoes.  My disease-blogger friends are all dedicated people who, in their minds and in mine, are performing a valuable service by alerting their readers to some very real threats and dangers.  Their surveillance uncovered the swine flu pandemic before the world’s press did, and their work on tracking H5N1 has proven to be extremely accurate.  I hope Law’s Krumwiede would not get the attention he gets in the movie.  However, having sat numerous times where Law’s character sat, in a quiet studio, in front of a television camera with an IFB in my ear, talking to a reporter or a network news anchor, I can understand how a marginal “playa” could become a fiend, mainstreamed by the press. It is up to the individual to censor him/herself and to produce accurate content.

Summation

““Contagion”” is an incredibly well-researched, disturbingly plausible, and extremely well-made film.  With the exceptions of the vaccine production timetable and the downplaying of the damage to the economy and the critical infrastructure, Soderbergh and Burns got it right.  Soderbergh is his own cinematographer as well (under a nom de plume), and his use of “available light” in place of standard movie lighting techniques makes the film feel much more realistic -- which means, of course, much more disturbing.  The cast, without exception, is fantastic.  Gwyneth Paltrow factors heavily throughout the film, so her apparent quick departure in the film’s first act is compensated for throughout the movie. 

And equally exceptional is the villain, the MEV-1 virus.  The fact that it is based on a real virus should wake us all up to the need to engage more strenuously in personal hygiene, and remember the things Momma taught us:

•       Wash your hands frequently.
•       Cover your cough, not with your hands, but with your sleeve, or a handkerchief or napkin.
•       Keep a respectable distance from strangers.

Now go put on your Level 4 gear and go see the movie!

Here are some other sites, in case you want more “Contagion” stuff:

Mike Coston’s superb Avian Flu Diary, and his entry on the movie.

http://afludiary.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-you-should-catch-”Contagion”.html

An interview with Dr. Mike Osterholm on the accuracy of “Contagion”:

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/wellness/129464038.html

And a dynamite Wired blog, written by the extremely talented Maryn McKenna, featuring an interview with Dr. Ian Lipkin.  Maryn has two books in print that hypochrondriacs should not read.  Her latest is on MRSA and it is called Superbug. Find it at your local bookstore, if one still exists, or order it from Amazon.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/”Contagion”-questions-spoilers/all/1

Last, and least, an article on “Contagion” from a Palm Springs, California newspaper, with some quotes from yours truly.

http://www.mydesert.com/article/20110911/NEWS01/109110341/-”Contagion”-not-far-fetched

The entertainment Website Filmonair.com has put up some clips from the Steven Soderbergh disease thriller "Contagion."  enjoy them and listen to A-list actors deliver such lines as "social distancing" and "Congress is figuring out how to work online." 

http://www.filmonair.com/video/

This week, an elderly Central Florida woman named Catherine "Cay" Thompson died of swine (H1N1/2009) influenza.

The news report, a capsule of which can be found here, says the Lake County (just north of Orlando) woman had recently traveled to California.  the new report also says local health officials are "shocked" that a flu case should come so early in the season.

A more detailed Orlando Sentinel account can be found here.

There are a few takeaways to these articles that just jump out at me.

First, are we surprised that a (previously) pandemic virus would still be circulating in the United States outside of flu season?  Pandemic viruses do not follow the seasonal pattern.  When do we determine that a pandemic virus loses its characteristic ability to infect people outside of "flu" season?  We all know the WHO said "stand down, please" to the H1N1/2009 pandemic, declaring it over well before now.  But when exactly does a virus lose its ability to infect outside of flu season?  I would imagine that occurs when the virus burns through the population enough to establish more of a seasonal-looking infection pattern.  I would also imagine that occurs due to natural mutations in the virus itself.  But since the WHO declared the 2010 vaccine formula would be used again in 2011, it would seem that any evolution in the virus, to this point, and based on surveillance, was very minor.

The Sentinel article states the woman and her church group traveled to California, and she fell ill while there.  She then returned early back to Florida.  It does not state how long she was in California before she fell ill, but we all know that influenza takes several days to manifest symptoms.  She died on August 25th, and I cannot find a church calendar that would shed light on when she might have first been exposed to the virus.

Even with these gaps in the travel calendar, I think we can draw up a theory.  The answer to how this unfortunate woman contracted influenza may be found, not from the visit to California, but much, much closer to home.  Orlando, as everyone knows, is a massive tourist destination.  South Americans love Disney just as much as the Brits and the Europeans and the Chinese and the Japanese.  And, indeed, India is struggling with swine flu right now.  But it is amazing how we fail to look south and, instead, default to looking to our left and right for answers.  It's flu season right now in the Southern Hemisphere.  And it is officially Hot as &@%%$ in Florida right now.  Well, actually, pretty much everywhere.  So the chances of a flu virus circulating in 90-degree-plus temperatures is remote.

In my opinion, it is far more likely that this woman actually contracted influenza at the Orlando International Airport, rather than being infected in California.  One sneeze from a Chilean or Argentine would have done the trick.

The other takeaway from this story is the woman's apparent lack of immunity to H1N1.  We all know that pandemic viruses disproportionately attack the young, sparing the elderly, who -- hypothetically -- have been previously exposed to a similar strain of the returning pandemic virus.

But this was not the case with Mrs. Thompson.  There are references in the stories to her immune system, and how the virus overtook it.  But Mrs. Thompson, being 80 years of age, would have had to have lived through the transformation of the Spanish Flu (1918 A/H1N1) and its many mutations.  She would have lived through the near-pandemic 1943, 1947 and 1951 attacks of H1N1.  She would have lived through the transition from H1N1 to H2N2 in 1957.  And she would have gone through two waves of the swine flu, which attacked Orlando pretty hard, precisely because of its status as a global vacation destination. She also appeared to be in relatively good health, based on her levels of activity within the church.

Where I am going with this blog entry is that we should take a closer look at the virus that felled Mrs. Thompson.  It would be wise for public health experts and scientists to tke a look at Mrs. Thompson's killer through an electron microscope, because the death of an otherwise-healthy 80-year old woman from swine H1N1 should not be simply relegated to statistic status.