The whole month of May was spent in the hard work of the pioneers. After this month, there were no new migrant ships coming from the direction of South Africa, and this year's immigration work in the East officially ended. By July, the convoy to Europe will return to the East Coast with another group of migrants (mostly slave girls) and supplies, at which point the officially organized migration will be officially terminated.

At the end of the migration activities, the soybean harvest in the western wilderness area also entered a state of war. The horse-drawn soybean harvester leased by the company has been in place, and the agricultural workers have been recuperating for a long time before it is officially launched. However, at this time, an unexpected illness suddenly broke out.

On 25 May, a shack full of Italian workers suddenly erupted in one of the 12 common infectious diseases on the East Coast, which the Ministry of Health had clearly documented. As soon as the news broke, the patrol police were dispatched and strict quarantine measures were taken: the house where the disease had occurred was immediately sealed off, and the patrol police stood guard to prevent the sick workers in the house from having any form of contact with the outside residents until they were cured of the disease or reached the required quarantine period.

During this period, only the only doctor on the two farms was allowed to enter and leave the house, but the doctor must also follow strict precautions to avoid taking germs out of the ward. To this end, the staff of the Health Bureau of the District Administration Office, who rushed to the farm department on horseback after hearing the news, prepared several sets of medical burqas and simple disinfection facilities inside and outside the house.

Workers in quarantine are paid their salaries, and all water and drink are delivered by the patrol officers guarding them. After the quarantine period expires, every household in this sick house will be strictly disinfected. Even. After the sick worker walks out of the house at the end of the quarantine period. The patrol will also be ordered to burn down the entire house - a worthless shack anyway - so that no germs can spread it to others.

This is not alarmist, petty fuss. The East Coasters have already suffered this kind of loss - in the old settlements, of course. Since the newly developed land has been barren for the past 10 million years, the uninhabited land is relatively lightly polluted and the number of germs is relatively small. Thus, most of the diseases in these frontier settlements came from the newly immigrated inhabitants, and as in the case of the scarlet fever outbreak, the disease probably came from Italian workers introduced by Valentino from the Old World. These people apparently did not show any symptoms when they were quarantined at the docks, or they were infected by someone else while they were at the docks. In short, there has never been an outbreak of this infectious disease among the original less than 500 inhabitants of the bush farm, and this terrible epidemic can only be brought in by someone else from the outside.

The incidence of various infectious diseases in the old settlements is often much higher than in the new settlements. The inhabitants of the Republic of the East Coast are industrious, resilient, and fearless, and the harsh natural environment and hard work cannot defeat them, but the invisible and untouchable diseases are destroying their will with impunity. These diseases are prevalent mainly among children and the elderly, such as infectious diseases such as measles, smallpox, scarlet fever and diphtheria, and among young adults, it is mainly yellow fever, with occasional horrific injuries, dysentery and cholera.

In the second half of last year, a terrible cholera epidemic broke out in Ping'an County in northern China. The initial source of infection is believed to have come from the Portuguese in the Gérard Mountains in the north. This businessman who does small commodity wholesale causes a catastrophe in the two densely populated townships of Baoan Township and Ping'an Township. A full 600 people were quarantined after being infected, and production in the entire industrial zone was affected by a certain amount of time. The patrolmen rushed out to cordon off the isolated neighborhoods, and the county militia brigade was urgently mobilized, and the scene was no less than a small war.

Doctors and nurses from neighboring counties and townships have also been urgently dispatched to Ping'an County to help, and the hanging bottle infusion technology, which has just been promoted on the east coast for a short time, has been applied to the treatment of cholera, but the effect is still not satisfactory in general. In the past, the mortality rate of cholera on the east coast was maintained at about 75 percent, but now with this technology, the mortality rate has only been reduced to 66 percent, and a large number of infected people have died, including some skilled workers, which is particularly deplorable to Qian Hao, the county magistrate.

And just after emergency measures were taken and the disease in the urban area was suppressed, cholera became epidemic in the countryside. In particular, the villages inhabited by Guarani hired workers are the hardest hit areas, with a mortality rate of almost 100%. What is even more frightening is that it is not known whether they do not trust the doctors on the east coast, or if they are afraid that the army on the east bank will isolate the entire sick village, and the Guarani people hide the disease. They secretly buried the bodies of the sick and dead outside the village, or let some of the sick carry a certain amount of water to the mountains alone, cutting off contact with the village, in a vain attempt to conceal the fact of the outbreak of the disease, and passively wait for the disease to die away naturally.

However, such a hasty response was clearly extremely irresponsible, and instead of concealing the disease, it became a large-scale epidemic in the surrounding areas. Not only did the Guaraní who were weak resistant to the disease fall ill and die in large numbers, but there were also many people who settled in the east bank of the country - because some of the sick Guaraní fled their villages and brought the disease with them, otherwise any kind of infectious disease would not have been so easy to spread due to the population density of the east bank countryside.

After the incident became a big one, the North Yazihu District Administrative Office dispatched patrol police to quickly block all roads, intercept a suspicious element and isolate it on the spot. At the same time, the War Department ordered the Xihu County Militia Brigade next door to send two squadrons to Coal River Township, where the disease was most severe, and sealed off the villages that were determined to be sick and those suspected to be sick. Among them, the villages of the people on the east coast were fully stationed by doctors to investigate the situation, and the villages of Guarani were immediately cordoned off, and those who did not comply were immediately shot.

Most of the doctors from the three counties in the Yazi Lake basin were mobilized to Coal River Township, where they wore strictly sterilized medical burqas and went to the almost completely dead village of Guaraní to collect the bodies of the sick and dead and perform autopsies to determine the cause of their deaths. At the same time, another team was sent outside the village to find the bodies of the sick disposed of by the Guaraní. Those that were not buried were buried immediately, and the hastily dug tombs were also reinforced, and finally uniformly disinfected by special personnel.

After this incident, the health department of the East Coast has stepped up the popularization of common infectious diseases among urban and rural residents. For example, the terrible cholera, which was previously regarded as an ordinary gastrointestinal disease or acute abdomen, often caused great disasters. By the time the disease is diagnosed, things are often out of control, so proper education and medical emergency measures are the only way to deal with such a vicious epidemic. It is not easy for the small East Coast to accumulate population, and if there are so many large-scale epidemics every month, then the country will not have to do anything, and it will be gritting its teeth and tossing diseases all day long.

There was also an unintended side effect of this incident. The inhabitants of the East Bank have become more tolerant of the Guaraní and have begun to reject the Guaraní from settling or seeking employment in the territory of the Republic, and the grassroots militia, patrolmen and even ordinary villagers have turned a blind eye to the Guaraní with verbal insults or personal attacks, often turning a blind eye to the Government. Although these Guaraní people are also victims of infectious diseases, and those Guarani villages and even entire villages are dying, the East Bank residents who have lost their loved ones do not empathize, they just need to know that these Guaraní are "unknown" and have brought disaster to themselves, so they need to be evicted. The situation of the Guaraní people seems to have deteriorated dramatically overnight!

At the beginning of June, the staff of the health bureau of the regional administration department visited the big wilderness farm and shrub farm, and found that the scarlet fever did not break out in other places, which made everyone breathe a sigh of relief. Now the population of these two farms is increasing, and the number of elderly people and children is also increasing rapidly. Recurrent epidemics such as measles, smallpox, scarlet fever and diphtheria, while not particularly troubling for adults, are likely to lead to a large number of neonatal deaths in the East Coast when they become widespread among frail children. In recent years, the infant mortality rate in the counties and townships of the East Coast Republic has remained high, and it is not without the "credit" of these recurrent and tormenting diseases that cause people on the East Coast to die of immortality.

Of these terrible diseases, with the exception of smallpox, which can be suppressed a little (and the effect is not very significant), the rest of the diseases are often helpless, and a large number of newborns die every year on the East Coast. In particular, the old settlements with relatively large populations, relatively stricter pollution and more frequent population movements have a high incidence of disease and a large number of infant deaths.

Whenever symptoms appear, the patrol officers often confine the sick person and his family to their own houses to minimize the possibility of infection. Of course, the above is the limit of what they can do, and the East Coast government's research on diseases and germs is still very superficial - they don't even have a high-magnification medical microscope, and the research and development of various targeted drugs is also slow, which is the reason for the frequent occurrence of diseases and the high mortality rate.

Fortunately, the East Coast is still a sparsely populated New World, and in the densely populated Old World, a single pandemic can often devastate a city. In the records of this era, the number of deaths abounded in areas with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of epidemics (the spread was very small, but the mortality rate was high), and the death toll of each epidemic on the east coast was only a few dozen to hundreds, which fully demonstrated the efficiency of the government and the effective response to the measures.

On June 20, 1649, the Xiling District Administration lifted the quarantine order, declaring the scarlet fever to be nip in the bud before it could reach a large-scale outbreak. At the same time, the "Pioneer 1649" soybeans, which were widely sown in the Western Wilderness area, also achieved a bumper harvest, and everyone from farm operators to ordinary agricultural workers was overjoyed. (To be continued......)