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@Tsherry. If enough people die or become disabled in a relatively short period of time, there will be an entire series of unforseen and unanticipated consequences. Who will be bringing our the dead and who will be burying them? What happens to the kids left behind? How do you maintain basic services? If a good number of health care and first responders are affected, what level of services will be available? Not to mention who will grow the food, who will drive groceries and retail items to the stores? What type of shortages and supply chain issues will we face? Welcome to the brave new world.
Sometime last year I wrote a short story called The Sixth Year, which looked at the outcome of that very thing, six years after the protagonists family died.
-No one brings out the dead; they lie where they died, unless they're buried by their own. With enough death, it's not a stretch to think that being exposed to a dead body could result in the transmission of the disease that killed them.
-There were no children left. Sterility took care of that going forward. The lead character hadn't seen a child in years.
-There are no basic services left. Water is collected by a hand-dug well or a nearby river or rainfall. Electricity failed early. Heat and cooking is done with wood fired appliances.
-Collection of pre-collapse foodstuffs and supplies occupied the lead character for awhile. Growing and collecting food growing wild, and a small chicken flock along with trading with the handful of survivors in a city that once held a half-million allows him to eke out a sort of existence.
-There are no doctors, nurses, and limited remaining supplies with the complete collapse of manufacturing and industrial scale food production. The hospitals were the center of dying, and years went by before the lead character entered one to get basic medicines after all other sources were exhausted. Anyone on 'maintenance regimens' found themselves dead if the virus didn't get them.
-There is no air traffic, rail, trucking or fuel. They were used up and no new supplies came. A long-haul trucker was stranded near the lead characters' residence early on when his company shut off his truck remotely, never to be heard from again. He was provided a car and gasoline, and was never heard from again.
-There is no law enforcement, military, or government. There aren't people in adequate numbers to field any of them.
That future is bleak, at best.
The supply chain is what you can gather within a few miles of your hovel, on a thrashed out mountain bike with panniers and a shotgun handy. Dogs and cats look like food. You look like food to mountain lions and bears.
Years in, anyone set out to do evil is probably dead, and the rest of the population regards "society" as something to be avoided.
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