Jon Honeyball imagines what would happen if a different type of virus attacks our network hubs

It’s Monday morning, 8am. The Heathrow terminals are busy, with the usual rush of business people flying off to parts foreign. According to Heathrow’s own figures for 2017, each day 214,000 passengers fly into and out of the UK’s biggest airport. Top destinations? New York JFK, Dubai, Dublin, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, all of which (with the possible exception of Dublin) are major hubs in their own right.

Four men stand, one in each terminal’s departure lounge. At the prescribed time, they open a sealed vial and spray a colourless, odourless vapour into the air of the lounge. No-one notices. Everyone proceeds onto their flight, unaware of what has happened.

Within hours, tens of thousands of exposed individuals have boarded planes, many destined for those four global hubs. Each is now a carrier for a custom-made, genetically designed plague.

After a few hours, they start to cough. Not enough to reduce a plane full of people to a wracking medical emergency; just enough to aerosolise the pathogen into the arrivals halls and air-conditioning systems, where it’s quickly transported to the departure lounges for the next wave of carriers. That’s assuming this is some clever custom infection. Something based on common cold virus takes two to three days to incubate – it’s 11-14 days for flu, according to doctor friends – and less than 24 hours is pretty much unworkable ( pcpro.link/287vir). But let’s imagine that this is something new and exotic, and so phase two starts. Especially if our four instigators have themselves got onto planes, and travelled to these destinations to take onward flights and repeated their spraying in new departure lounges.

Within 48 hours, the initial Heathrow passenger carriers are feeling deeply unwell, with a rising temperature and flu-like symptoms. But they’ve dispersed around the globe, so it’s hard to spot the trend. After 72 hours, the second wave has succumbed too, and A&E wards in major cities are becoming overwhelmed. After six days, the first Heathrow passengers start to die.

The plague creeps out across the globe, eventually reaching into every town and village. There is no immediate cure, nor hope for a vaccine to prevent infection, because this is leading-edge, custom DNA engineering, paid for by the endless wash of money that floats around the mad, bad and truly evil.

In a month, a billion are dead. In three months, 2.5 billion. In six months, half the world’s population has gone, with only those in the remotest of outposts being safe. Society has collapsed: those who smugly predicted the end of the world and had stocked up on baked beans have discovered that their water supply wasn’t as good as they hoped. America goes into mass meltdown, where everyone has a gun and good reason to use it.

Those that have the real resources have fled to their private islands, or are in their bunkers. Which is good for humanity, because what we really need are the billionaire social media founders. They will rebuild the planet, one Like button at a time.

Is this fantasy land? Could we lose half the world’s population by Christmas due to a bioterrorism attack at Heathrow? Maybe, maybe not. But the answer is not a definitive “no”. Are there government initiatives to deal with this? I have no idea – I’m not security cleared for this sort of stuff, and if I were, I wouldn’t be writing this column. I’m sure there are plans in place, and I’d hope that they have the right people being considered for protection. If the world doesn’t need social media founders, it certainly doesn’t need many of our MPs either. Or, as dear Douglas Adams put it, “the telephone sanitisers”.

Is there anything we can do? Shut down air travel? Dr Tom Frieden, director of the USA’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said this regarding the Ebola outbreak in 2014: “A travel ban is not the right answer. It’s simply not feasible to build a wall – virtual or real – around a community, city, or country. When a wildfire breaks out we don’t fence it off. We go in to extinguish it before one of the random sparks sets off another outbreak somewhere else.” Which works when you have a containable problem. What happens when it’s in every major city?

Why am I minded of this? I was standing on the concourse of Heathrow Terminal 5 and suddenly thought “what if”? And when you do the sums, and think of an edge case that might just work well enough to actually spread some custom nasty bug, the numbers are truly terrifying. Hopefully no-one out there is mad enough or well funded enough to actually do this. But I can’t claim to be hopeful.

Could we lose half the world’s population by Christmas due to a bioterrorism attack at Heathrow?