Due to the low administrative level of Shuozhou, Li Ang took the train overnight to Yunzhou.
After showing the jade pendant in Yunzhou to prove his identity, he got the close insect. Then he used the close insect to contact Chen Danqiu, the wine sacrificer, and Li Shun, the Yu Emperor, who were far away in Chang'an.
Li Ang explained the seriousness of the plague, describing it as a disease more serious than the great plague of the late Han Dynasty and the great plague of the Jin Dynasty.
This is no exaggeration. The essence of plague is a severe infectious disease spread by Yersinia pestis through rat fleas.
A diseased flea may only have a few hundred Yersinia pestis in its body.
But when it bites the human body, the plague bacteria will reach the local lymph nodes along the lymphatic vessels, where they will multiply rapidly and release a large amount of toxins, leading to acute lymphadenitis, forming dense swellings as big as eggs.
It causes patients to have chills, high fever, sudden rise in body temperature, severe headache, and shortness of breath.
Judging from the current average physical condition of the people of Yu State, even optimistic estimates suggest that the mortality rate is at least 50%.
Yersinia pestis and its endotoxin will then enter the blood circulation along the lymphatic circulatory system, causing sepsis and extensive bleeding on the skin.
If it invades the lungs, it can cause secondary pneumonic plague.
The patient suffered severe chest pain, coughing, and coughing up blood droplets and bloody sputum, and died of toxic shock, respiratory failure, and heart failure within two or three days of onset. The mortality rate is close to one hundred percent.
What's even worse is that patients suffering from pneumonic plague will also exhale air containing Yersinia pestis, and they no longer need to rely on flea bites on rats to continue to spread the disease.
Moreover, Yersinia pestis has strong resistance to environmental factors and can still survive in an environment of minus 30 degrees Celsius. It can survive under direct sunlight for four hours and among frozen corpses, it can survive for four to five months. And if it is in dry expectoration, it can even survive for several weeks to a year.
Every wild mammal infested with rat fleas, every dead animal, every plague patient,
Including the clothes he wears, the items he uses, the phlegm he coughs up, and even the air he exhales are all sources of disease transmission.
Under Li Ang's strong persuasion, a train loaded with thousands of soldiers, hundreds of doctors and various supplies arrived in Shuozhou late that night.
Li Ang, Qiu Feng, and Ouyang Shi dissected many Shuozhou mouse corpses overnight and determined that the mice contained Yersinia pestis.
This result is very bad, because if there is no Yersinia pestis in the mice in Shuozhou, it means that the current epidemic is more of pneumonic plague, and only the sick human patients need to be controlled to cut off the transmission route.
The discovery of Yersinia pestis in mice means that in addition to pneumonic plague patients exhaling the bacteria and infecting others,
There is also a more direct route of transmission, in which rat fleas bite humans and cause bubonic plague.
Rat fleas do not only parasitize mice. Marmots, hares, wild cats, wild foxes, wild wolves, etc. are all within the parasitic range of rat fleas.
Shuozhou is covered with dense forests, vast wilderness, and countless wild animals. There are also many farms and villages located in the woods...
The earliest human patients were likely exposed to plague-infected animals in the wild.
After the support train from Chang'an arrived, Li Ang first sent soldiers to block the main streets in the city and conduct traffic control. Sulfur and lime were spread over large areas in residential areas.
He divided Shuozhou City into twenty areas. People in each area were required to wear badges of various colors on their shoulders when going out. They could only move within this area and not across areas.
The same goes for soldiers and doctors.
Subsequently, he sent people to print paper leaflets and deliver them door to door to inform people about how the plague spread.
Each household is asked to clean up mice in the house first. If any family members start to cough or feel sick, they must report it as soon as possible.
Soldiers would pick up patients at their homes, disinfect and seal off the houses.
(If no one at home can read, the soldiers will read the leaflet outside the house)
In addition, every few days, soldiers would come to the door and deliver necessary daily necessities such as meat, rice, oil, firewood, water, as well as clean cloth and masks.
People should try not to go out unless necessary.
Later, Li Ang asked monks sent from Chang'an to build flat-panel houses with wooden planks outside the city to be used as isolation wards.
People showing different symptoms will be assigned to wards in different areas, and doctors wearing full protective equipment will inspect and observe them.
Contacts of plague patients, suspected patients, family members of patients, etc., if their body temperature has been normal for seven consecutive days, they can be quarantined and return to their homes.
There are also the bodies of dead patients.
Since Yersinia pestis is extremely adaptable to cold environments, burial is not reliable, so Li Ang can only burn all the corpses of the patients together.
Like many places in Yu State that pay attention to burial, Shuozhou has always practiced burial.
But the death conditions of those deceased were too horrific, and the disease spread and developed too quickly.
No matter how traditional people believe in it, after seeing the mountains of purple and black corpses, they will be filled with fear and unable to stand up to oppose.
————
"Teacher? Teacher?"
The call rang in his ears, and Li Ang, who was leaning against the wall, woke up in a daze and saw Ouyang Shi with a worried look on his face.
"Did I fall asleep again?"
Li Ang yawned and took the hot tea from Ouyang Shi. He still hadn't had a good night's sleep in a long time. He just wanted to lean against the wall and meditate for a while, but he fell asleep standing up unknowingly.
"Um."
Ouyang Shi nodded, "Teacher, why don't you go to bed and sleep for a while? Staying up like this day and night is really not an option."
"I'm fine."
Li Ang took a sip of hot tea and shook his head to wake himself up, "How is the epidemic situation today?"
"There are 370 suspected cases, 280 confirmed cases, and the death toll...196 people."
Li Ang was silent for a long time and asked: "...Where is the patient's body?"
Ouyang Shi carefully looked at his expression and said softly: "It has been burned."
Li Ang silently looked at the tea leaves floating in the cup,
Since he came to Shuozhou and promulgated the epidemic prevention strategy, the death toll first increased to 400 people per day (mostly patients in the incubation period who accumulated during the period when there was no epidemic prevention strategy).
Then it dropped to 300 people a day, and now, 200 people are dying every day.
There is no specific medicine, which means that the only way to deal with the plague at this stage is isolation and control.
For those people who have not yet contracted the disease and have done their best to maintain personal hygiene, they are living in constant panic every day.
And for those confirmed patients who have already contracted the disease...the despair they feel is something no one can understand.
