The Outbreak 2020

By Avinash Pandey

This is a gripping tale of an intensivist grappling with the mayhem a novel corona virus has unleashed on the World in year 2020.
In a story scanning across continents and oceans, find how an un-celled organism gained its virulence and lethality? Where and how did it origin? Why it chose humans as vector and host? Be witness to this drama, step by step, as the virus clutches the whole planet in its jaws, with no one spared, no government unaffected and no city untouched. Find the utter desperation of modern healthcare and brilliant minds to invent a cure, a miracle pill perhaps, where no conventional medicine seems to be working. Notice the deluge of hospitals with plethora of geriatrics, huffing and gasping to vie for limited ventilators. They naively pursued disseminating the virus in unsuspecting paramedics with each cough, with each sneeze and sometimes with just a tender touch! With mighty governments, shrewd diplomats, royal aristocrats and menacing military stooped down to their knees, bowing as supplicants to this tiny fragment of apparently innocuous nucleic acid in both, reverence and hate.
Ravi Kumar, a middle aged celibate intensivist, guileless of what this new invisible yet pervasive demon is bringing in his life, worked with nonchalance in his intensive care Unit. Soon he finds himself locked in remote squalid dilapidated isolation camp, hounded equally by military and media. He became the victim not only of this outbreak, but also of the people, the constitution and the government. Can he survive this onslaught? Can he escape death? Can he achieve redemption? Will he ever stand vindicated or will just be another irrelevant pawn in this tidal wave of death. Get ready to dive in this tsunami of unprecedented global pandemic, the outbreak 2020.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avinash Pandey
• Release date: Apr 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463561409

Avinash Pandey

Cancer physicianResearcherAvid ReaderAssociate ProfessorMedical Oncology

Book preview

The genesis

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.-William Wordsworth

                                                                           KORO'S STORY- I

29th February, 2020, 9:52 A.M; Heathrow Airport, London

All passengers travelling to New Delhi on British Airway flight BA143 are now requested to start boarding from Gate 117 A

I could hear this cavernous cacophony percussed through ribs and conducted through guttural passages as a 'tip off' to initiate my savages. I am lodged in ambient confines of humid alveoli of Kabir Khan, who is about to spike a fever. Sipping hot cappuccino in uber-cool HIghway Café house, my host is perspiring and trying to subdue the rising nausea with a strong caffeine. Oblivious to my presence in the Cafe house are the German Literary couple who are anticipating flight delay after returning from their book promotional event from Hay Literary festival concluded last week. A band of young musicians are boisterous and still tipsy from the Gin which they devoured after their Gig in Cartagena International Music Festival last night.

               Solemnly docked in the corner are Elderly couple from California bound to New Delhi for thrifty Hip replacement Surgery. The lady is tendering the festered wound of her diabetic beau who hobbled to receive a plate of  Crudities. Caressing her embellishments is a twenty two year old aspiring model from New York who is accompanying an older, draper and astute businessman. He pretended hobnobbing with his stock broker professing prescient remarks on likely trend of New York Stock Exchange which is to reopen in next few hours for trading. Gregarious kids returning from a vacation from Hawaii Islands wore an impish look while spilling their plates overflowing with chocolate sauce. Interestingly, catering to all above