Although some local communities have been reporting small animals suddenly dropping dead in their area, an Italian matinee idol's death in an auto crash in early March sparks media attention.
The outbreaks of something called Tibetan flu begin to inflict massive casualties, with a number of countries reporting hundreds of thousands killed from random heart attacks.
The Soviet Union's premier and vice-premier die of the illness, and Meyer is forcibly committed to the Sloan-Kettering Institute to prevent revealing the truth about the virus.
Things are also worse in the scientific community; the fact that no one except the now-dead Porton Down researchers know of the existence of the space microbes (which have been suppressed for secrecy reasons) cripples efforts to develop a vaccine.
Over the next four years, the community in Antarctica - an estimated 10,000 strong - gradually breaks down national affiliations and learn to live together while tapping the continent's natural resources.
Admiral Conway and Major Carter of the US reveals that the earthquake has the potential to destroy a Distant Early Warning Line station in the state and in the process trip the Automatic Reaction System (ARS), a command computer for the US strategic arsenal.
Yoshizumi and Major Carter - who have been inoculated by French scientist Dr Henri Louis De la Tour with an experimental vaccine derived from samples of the virus irradiated with neutron energy - arrive in Washington at roughly the same time as the Alaska earthquake.
Already reeling from the pain of a snake bite and seeing a young skeleton resembling his dead daughter, Carter commits suicide and Yoshizumi stays in the bunker, alerting the Nereid to head for open water immediately as he sits out the nuclear exchange.
This group is stunned to see Yoshizumi emerge from hiding nearby - he spent the past several years trekking all the way from Washington, proving that de la Tour's vaccine worked.
In August 1980, ten full years after the pandemic, the human colony in Argentina prepares to send an exploration team into the interior.