Outbreak Day

This article is about the event from the HBO series. For its appearance in the video game series, see Outbreak Day. For the real-world event formerly called "Outbreak Day", see The Last of Us Day.

An airplane crashes and explodes in downtown Austin, Texas during Outbreak Day.

Outbreak Day was the event in which Cordyceps brain infection became a global pandemic on September 26, 2003. The Cordyceps fungus, previously unable to infect humans, mutated and evolved due to global warming and was able to adapt to the average human's body temperature.

The initial outbreak began in Jakarta, Indonesia by September 23. The fungus spread inside a flour and grain factory that was a global supplier of key ingredients for staple consumable products, thus distributing contaminated food supplies across the planet. Millions of people then consumed flour and grain products contaminated with Cordyceps and became infected with it. Highly aggressive within a short incubation period, society quickly collapsed by September 26, as millions perished or became infected.

History

Prelude

In 1968, Doctor Neuman prophesied on an ABC talk show that the fungus known as Cordyceps would evolve to be able to infect humans. He suggested that this evolution would most likely occur due to global warming, wherein rising atmospheric temperatures would lead to the fungus mutating and adapting itself to tolerate the increased temperatures. As a byproduct of this change, the fungus would now be able to infect human hosts, whose internal body temperatures would have previously been too high for it to do so.

In 2003, this apocalyptic scenario became reality when a fungal infection, medically classified as the Cordyceps brain infection, first emerged in Jakarta, Indonesia by September 23. The first signs of its spread were noticed at a flour and grain factory. While referring to the flour and grain factory in Jakarta, Mycology Professor Ratna Pertiwi remarks that the location provides an excellent substrate for the fungus. Here, its deadly symptoms were observed in one of the workers and three others whom she infected. An additional fourteen workers also went missing due to infected-related attacks.

Despite warnings by Dr. Ratna Pertiwi to contain the outbreak through drastic measures, Jakarta's role in international flour and grain distribution caused contaminated products such as bread, cereal, pancake mix, and other edible goods to be distributed internationally, hitting shelves in the United States on Thursday, September 25. The pandemic took hold and reached a state of critical mass when people who consumed enough of the contaminated products over the following day soon became infected and began to be admitted en masse to emergency rooms, quickly overwhelming hospitals in the process. Soon, the fungus began influencing its infected hosts' behavior, violently attacking people and spreading itself to others via biting and contact through bodily fluids.

Main outbreak

In the United States, the outbreak fully manifested on September 26, with large numbers of infected attacking and killing or infecting many uninfected people around them. By the early hours of September 27, the government declared a state of national emergency and mobilized the Federal Disaster Response Agency and the United States military, with the support of local law enforcement, to halt the spread of the infection.

Carnage erupts on the streets of Austin.

In Austin, Texas, the military blocked the highway leading in or out of the city and set up a temporary base and safe zone area for citizens fleeing from the infected. Much of the city erupted into chaos; police cars rushed to various areas around the city, setting up roadblocks to contain the city's residents believed to be infected, only for the infected to eventually overrun them. Gas leaks spread in the city, causing explosions that set the buildings ablaze. At least three passenger airliners made emergency take-offs from a nearby airport and flew low over the city, with one of them suddenly banking steeply upwards before stalling mid-air and crashing down into the city and destroying half of an entire neighborhood.

By September 30, only towns and the countryside lacked a high infected presence. FEDRA officials sent out soldiers to these areas to retrieve the residents living there and escort them to the quarantine zones in the cities they created to prevent these areas from falling to the infection. In Lincoln, Massachusetts, the military rounded up the town's citizens for evacuation to nearby Boston, where FEDRA had established a quarantine zone. However, after it was found that there was a lack of space in the quarantine zone, the soldiers executed all of the evacuees and left their bodies in a mass grave in a field outside of Lincoln. Only a single resident, Bill, survived because he distrusted the soldiers and hid in his survivalist bunker to avoid them, correctly deducing the fate of the other townspeople. Joel would later reveal to Ellie that FEDRA and the military justified the executions because killing the evacuees would prevent them from becoming infected.

Behind the scenes

• Although the source of the outbreak was not confirmed in-canon until "Long, Long Time", attentive viewers caught on to hints of its origins as early as the airing of the first episode: several who noticed references to Jakarta pointed out that the city is home to one of the world's largest flour and grain factories; additionally, Joel, Sarah, and Tommy avoid having flour-based products such as pancakes, biscuits, cookies, and cake on Outbreak Day, whereas the Adlers are seen consuming such products and eventually become infected.