Ask Sword

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 worm. Using the close worm again, he contacted Chen Danqiu, the sacrificial wine, and Emperor Yu Li Shun who were far away in Chang'an.

Li Ang explained the severity of the plague, describing it as a more serious plague than the Great Plague at the end of Han Dynasty and the Great Plague of Jin Dynasty.

This is not an exaggeration. The essence of plague is a severe infectious disease transmitted by Yersinia pestis through rat fleas.

A sick flea may only have a few hundred Yersinia pestis in its body,

But when it bites the human body, the Yersinia pestis will reach the local lymph nodes along the lymphatic vessels, where it will multiply rapidly and release a large amount of toxins, leading to acute lymphadenitis, forming dense, egg-sized swellings.

Make patients chills, high fever, sudden rise in body temperature, severe headache, shortness of breath.

Judging from the average physical condition of the people of Yu State today, even with an optimistic estimate, the mortality rate is at least 50%.

Then Yersinia pestis and its endotoxin will enter the blood circulation along the lymphatic circulatory system, causing sepsis, leading to extensive bleeding of the skin,

If it invades the lungs, it can cause secondary pneumonic plague.

It caused severe chest pain, coughing, coughing up blood foam and bloody sputum, and died of toxic shock, respiratory failure and heart failure within two or three days after the onset of the disease. The mortality rate is close to 100 percent.

What's more terrible is that patients suffering from pneumonic plague will also exhale the air containing the plague bacteria, so they no longer need to rely on the flea bites on the rats to continue to spread the disease.

Moreover, Yersinia pestis has strong resistance to environmental factors, and can survive in an environment of minus 30 degrees, can survive for four hours in direct sunlight, and can survive for four to five months in frozen corpses. And if it is in dry expectoration, it can even survive for several weeks to a year.

Every wild mammal infested by rat fleas, every animal carcass, every plague patient,

Including the clothes he wore, the items he used, the phlegm he coughed up, and even the air he exhaled were the source of spreading the disease.

Under Li Ang's persuasion, a train full of thousands of soldiers, hundreds of doctors and various supplies arrived in Shuozhou in the middle of the night.

Li Ang, Qiu Feng, and Ouyang Shi dissected many mouse corpses in Shuozhou overnight, and confirmed that the mice contained Yersinia pestis.

This is a bad result, because if there is no Yersinia pestis in the mice in Shuozhou, it means that pneumonic plague is more prevalent now, and it only needs to control the sick human patients 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 them to suffer from 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 densely covered with forests, vast wilderness, and countless wild animals. There are also many farms and villages located in the forest.

The earliest human patients were likely exposed to plague-infected animals in the wild.

After the Chang'an support train arrived, Li Ang first sent soldiers to block the main streets in the city for traffic control. Scatter sulfur and lime in large areas in residential areas.

He divided Shuozhou City into 20 areas, and people in each area had to wear badges of various colors on their shoulders when they went out.

The same is true for soldiers and doctors.

Later, he sent people to print paper leaflets and delivered them door to door, informing the people of the way the plague spread.

All households are asked to clean up the rats in the house first. If a family member starts coughing or feels unwell, they must report it as soon as possible.

Soldiers will come to pick up patients, and disinfect and seal off the house.

(If no one at home can read, the soldiers will read the contents of the leaflet outside the house)

In addition, every few days, soldiers will come to the door, bringing meat, rice, oil, firewood, water and other necessary living materials, as well as clean cloth and masks.

People try not to go out unless necessary.

Afterwards, Li Ang asked the monks sent by Chang'an to build flat houses with wooden boards outside the city, which were used as isolation wards.

People showing different symptoms will be assigned to wards in different areas, and doctors wearing full protective equipment will patrol and observe them.

Contacts of plague patients, suspected patients, family members of patients, etc., if their body temperature is normal for seven consecutive days, they can be contacted and quarantined and return to their homes.

There are also the bodies of dead patients.

Because Yersinia pestis is extremely adaptable to the cold environment, burial is unreliable, 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 horrible, the spread and development of the disease was too fast and too fast,

People who believe in tradition, after seeing the pile of purple-black corpses, will be overwhelmed by fear and unable to stand up against it.

————

"Teacher? Teacher?"

The call sounded in his ears, and Li Ang, who was leaning against the wall, woke up in a daze, and saw Ouyang Shi who looked worried.

"I fell asleep again?"

Li Ang yawned and took the hot tea from Ouyang Shi. He still hasn't had a good night's sleep for a long time. He just wanted to lean against the wall and meditate for a while, but he fell asleep standing up unconsciously.

"Um."

Ouyang Shi nodded, "Teacher, why don't you go to bed and sleep for a while, it's really not an option to stay up all day and night."

"I'm fine."

Li Ang took a sip of hot tea, shook his head, and woke himself up, "How is the epidemic situation today?"

"Three hundred and seventy suspected patients, two hundred and eighty confirmed patients, and one hundred and ninety-six deaths."

Li Ang was silent for a long time, and asked, "Where's 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 accumulated during the period when there was no epidemic prevention strategy),

Then it dropped to 300 people per day, until now, 200 people died every day.

There is no specific medicine, which means that the only way to deal with the plague at this stage is to isolate and control it.

For those people who have not yet contracted the disease and keep their personal hygiene as good as possible, they live in constant anxiety every day.

And for those confirmed patients who have been infected, the despair they feel is beyond anyone's comprehension.