Can you find love during the outbreak of a pandemic?
Maggie is a brilliant, upcoming, and socially awkward scientist. After being recruited for a research team that is developing a COVID-19 vaccine, she unexpectedly finds love at the worst possible...
Forty-eight hours after my discovery had been discovered, the team had done the rest.
"Never thought death could be beautiful," Amy whispered. She reached over and squeezed my arm. "You did it. Total necrosis."
"We did it." I had gotten us started, but grueling work that had followed were definitely a team effort. We'd worked in teams of two continuously for the past two days and slept in the office, until we'd perfectied the destabilization of COVID-19.
"So... how long will it take to replicate the vaccine?" I asked Dr. McKenna.
"I'll give the antigens to the third floor, Dr. Henry's group will take it from there." Dr. McKenna looked just as tired and ragged as the rest of us, with large, puffy bags under his eyes.
I smiled as I thought of how busy Paul was going to be over the next few weeks.
"But I'll guess we could have it in clinical trials starting in two weeks, three max." He ran one hand over his beard, and pulled a tight smile. "Great work everyone."
"So, we can contain the outbreak in China, Italy?" Dr. McKenna shook his head at my next question and his eyes darkened a bit. "The infection rate is up to thirty days. And if this works, full vaccine won't be available to the public for eight, nine months at the earliest."
"Eight to nine months!?" I looked at him, horrified.
This was the most aggressive virus I'd ever seen. Okay, so it was also the only one I'd seen up close, but was quite terrifying to think about its aggressive nature combined with the slow infection rate. My mind absently traveled back to the bus window I'd tapped my fingers against the first time traveling here. Or the bowl of peanuts that sat on the edge of the bar.
Don't eat the peanuts.
Noah...
My mind flashed to images of the packed supermarkets. They would most likely keep those open, no matter what. People needed food.
"Trials normally start on mice, then monkeys, then humans." I saw Adam nudge Amy at Dr. McKenna's update.
"But not sure if animals can get COVID-19." She nudged him back. "And given now it's pandemic, it'll go straight to humans."
"And that's if it works. There's more than seven billion people on this planet. We only ran." He flipped over a piece of paper on his notebook. "Two thousand scenarios. We of course have missed something."
"So celebrate small tonight, take tomorrow off, we'll wrap up this week with calculating the COVID-19 mutation rates. We know they're slow but let's knock this down. I'll be busy on the phones for a few days, but let's meet Friday at eleven-thirty on what's next." He glanced over his notebook at me with a grin.
"We have an ex in Africa that just won't take the hint."
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