I had an idea for a story this morning. Feel free to pick up the treatment if you would like to play with it.
In the winter of 2019, a new variant of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), called SARS-CoV-2, swept out of central China like a wildfire burning through dry tinder. Known as COVID-19, it left broken bodies and lengthy quarantines in its wake. Despite its virulent nature, those afflicted with it, discounting any underlying medical issues, stood a better than average chance of recovering, and indeed, despite the high death toll, it passed through the planet without much of a backward glance.
The passage of COVID-2022 was not so unremarked. Unlike its predecessor, COVID-2022 was a death sentence. The job of a _first responder_ took on a new meaning. Houses, apartments, hospitals were burned to the ground to prevent the spread of the disease. Quarantines were enforced at the end of a gun barrel. In less than a year, the population of the planet was cut in half. Of the remaining half, more than a third of those died of starvation. Entire cities were reduced to rubble, and there were barely enough people to fill the island of Manhattan if there had been anywhere on the island to live. Small pockets of population, off the beaten track, were all that remained of the North American society.
But that was only the beginning. It became rapidly apparent that many of the technological wonders we relied on could not be supported with such a small population that was left. Worse, those wonders began to fail-first, the telecom networks, then the power grids. Whole swaths of knowledge, locked in silicone and metal, were lost. This lead to a rapid descent into a new Dark Age.