The Knoxville Cough, also known as the Two Day Flu, the Sickness, the Asian Cough, Asian Bird Flu, and the Death Flu,[1] among other names, is a virulent H5N1 strain of the avian influenza which emerged in 2021. It received its namesake from Knoxville, Tennessee where the disease was suspected to originate.[2]
History
It is unknown how the influenza virus first came to be, though it was speculated that it first appeared in Knoxville, Tennessee in 2021. Initially the virus was regarded as simply a more virulent strain of the annual influenza until the severity of the outbreak had spread across the United States and other parts of the world. By July 2021 the Knoxville Cough caused more than 100,000 deaths worldwide and was officially labeled a pandemic by the World Health Organization.[2] As the United States was already under a state of martial law, travel restriction were imposed in areas where cases of the influenza were identified, such as in St. Paul, Minnesota and Akron, Ohio.[2]
The devastating effect of the Knoxville Cough.
By August 2022, the Knoxville Cough had ravaged various countries in which approximately eighteen million people died from the virus, though the number was likely more.[3] At this point, though peak H5N1 activity had likely passed for most of the world, the virus still circulated in some regions into 2023.
The U.S. was particularly hard-hit by the virus in which it killed six million Americans and becoming one of the contributing factors sealing America's decline. The U.S. government was unable to appropriately respond to the crisis due to the nation's crumbling infrastructure and the high price of petroleum made the distribution of aid materials difficult and in some cases impossible.[3] Hospitals were overloaded with flu cases and unable to accept more patients in which the government publicly advised American citizens to stay indoors and avoid public meeting areas.[1]
Cities such as Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, and Akron were turned into virtual ghost towns as nearly the entire populace succumbed to the disease.[4] Despite martial law, some local municipalities fell into violent anarchy while other locales did better in maintaining security and governance.[5] Mexico closed its borders to the U.S. to prevent the Knoxville Cough from coming into its country, but continued to provide material assistance to its neighbor. On August 19, 2022, the U.S. government ended the Congressional "Declaration of a Public Health Emergency" which signaled the end to the H5N1 pandemic in America after several months of low flu activity and the vaccination of over 100 million Americans.[3]
The President of the United States in his farewell address in 2025, shortly after the detonation of the GKR EMP blast across America, describes the Knoxville Cough as "the most vicious pandemic in human history".[6]
Trivia
- According to Homefront: The Voice of Freedom, it is briefly mentioned that there were rumors the virus was caused by an "engineered virus from an unfriendly nation", but such rumors were never actually proven.
- Approximately ten years after Homefront's release, the real-life COVID-19 pandemic occurred in 2019, thus making the Knoxville Cough an accidental prediction.