Polite Dissent

Countdown to Adventure #3 “The Home Front: In the Time of the Plague”
Adam Beechen, writer
Eddy Barrows, pencils

Animal Man’s son Cliff has become infected with a strange disease that causes people to become violent and fly into a rage. He is secured and brought to the hospital, where to doctor examines him.

There are a few things that catch my eye in this scene.

1. The doctor states that the cause of Cliff’s infection is some sort of virus — but he doesn’t know how it is being spread. He then mentions that the infected patients are placed in isolation. So then why isn’t Cliff in isolation? Everyone in the room should be wearing gowns, gloves, and masks. Given that the virus may be airborne, he should also be in a negative pressure room as well. Instead, everyone — including the medical personnel — is just standing around talking, potentially exposing themselves to the virus (in fact, later scenes show the door to the room is sitting wide open — nice isolation). Standard medical protocol in cases like this is to isolate suspicious patients first and confirm infection afterward.
    
2. The doctor pretty much contradicts himself, saying that he believes that all the people who are going to get infected have already become infected — so then why worry about isolation at all?
    
3. While the viral infection may be an epidemic, I think “infectious disease specialist” fits the context better than “epidemiologist.”
    
4. I’m pretty impressed the doctor was able to see the virus at all under a microscope. Optical microscopes, under the best possible conditions, have a resolution limit of about 200 nanometers. Most viruses have a diameter of 10-150 nanometers, making them too small to be seen by standard microscopy. Non-optical microscopes such as electron microscopes can be used to visualize viruses, but these require a lot of preparation and aren’t the kind of tools a standard hospital has, or that a regular doctor would ever be allowed to use. (Of course, this is the DC Universe, where there seems to be a STAR Lab around every corner. So possibly they loaned the hospital some of their equipment — or maybe the doctor has the superpower to bend the laws of physics). There are also a few very, very rare viruses that are large enough to be seen with an optical microscope. It could be that seeing a virus this large is what led the doctor to believe that it is an “alien virus.”