Oh wow, you want to discuss the mortality rate of the Bug? This makes me deeply happy. Apologies for the forthcoming wall of text.
So, I'm only passingly educated on epidemiology (Tulane turned me down, so I majored in film), but since it's my story, by god, I get to make it up as I go along. It may not be accurate, but it's fiction, so it does what it needs to do. I'm more interested in the characters and drama in the wake of a global event that changes everyone's life, but I've written a few stories that are loosely in the same timeline, so there's a little more information about the Bug scattered around. I tend to slice away as much exposition as I can possibly stomach in these stories, because as much as I am interested in those sorts of world-building details, I prefer, as a reader, to have only hints and implications that I can build off of, rather than hear exactly what the author thinks they are. I find if I know the details and keep it consistent, that's far more compelling and lets the characters shine through, rather than providing an info-dump, which is essentially dead once it hits the page. There's no mystery and no interpretation.
That said, if you really want to know, here's what I know about the Bug.
The Bug has a nearly 100% mortality rate to those that contract it, at first. It's an engineered plague designed to wipe out the species, but it has some special quirks: some people, maybe ten percent or more stay asymptomatic for weeks to months after contracting it. The Bug is fast moving (close to, but not quite, Ebola fast), and avoids burning out host populations by being spread by carriers, who slip past most attempts at quarantine. The genesis of the Bug and why it caught the modern world off guard are the primary focus of "
Zero", an epistolary story that first appeared in Mad Scientist Journal.
There's another story I've recently sold called "One" that's more focused on people who are equipped to survive purely off that land, but it's more about the issues of trust and guilt that any survivor is going to have. It takes place just a few months after "The Blues." But here's the other thing, and this irrelevant to the events of "The Blues", the Bug has a piece of genetic code hidden in it, borrowed from Rabies, and that won't express itself for a year or two after pandemic, just when the survivors are starting to figure out how they're going to survive and move on, it's gonna get really weird. That's detailed more in a story that takes place a few decades later, called "Before". I sold that story to Nightfall magazine, which unfortunately folded before printing the first issue, so that story is still in search of a market.
Basically, the Bug (I've sort of christened this group of stories "The Plague Years") is my open ended canvas for any disease, pandemic, apocalypse, or, much later, zombie flavored story that I want to tell. Does the science or sociology hold up? Probably not at all. But it gets me to a place where I can tell the story of Alex and Roger's final days.
As for the name, I knew a Lief who pronounced it Lay-ff. That's as much as I know. And I had another friend who told me two years after I knew him that I was pronouncing his name wrong. I was King in that exchange. Sorry, Ronen. And I am totally thrilled with Gabe's narration. He nailed more things than I thought possible. I
love not being involved in adaptations of what I write. If I tell you exactly what I imagine, I'm robbing you of any other possible interpretation and I'd rather be surprised by how a story filters through other people.