I'll go first, just for kicks.
*WARNING: this is very parallel and might have some politics in it that are similar to our own world. If you are easily offended, please find another post to read that is more to your tastes. Politics herein don't necessarily represent my own views, just my theorizing of how the US and CS might have evolved as separate countries.
Late in 2019, a secret lab in the Democratic Socialist People's Republic of China, located in Harbin, leaked a virulent strain of a virus engineered in the lab. A combination of a coronavirus with the delivery system of HIV was released in late December. Blamed initially on people eating bats in the United States, while its southern neighbor, the Confederate States, were wary of what this could mean for them. Confederates asked their citizens overseas to return home through their embassies, issuing a mandatory evacuation order for all Confederates in Asia, and a voluntary evacuation for all Confederates in Europe, Africa, and Australia. The United States, however, issued no such order. President
Heather Clifton left the borders wide open and the ports wide open, going so far as to state that the Confederates were racist for recalling their personnel and citizens.
President Jessica Howard, about 30 years younger than her US counterpart, was much more worried about the situation, and how to protect her republic.
Confederate President Howard
Soon, however, the virus went past the border, and had entered the Confederated Chinese States (China), and had begun spreading through the older and poorer sections of the northeast, while the capital of Nanjing ordered all communist Chinese citizens deported. It would be too late, however, and soon the virus would spread into the unified Korean peninsula to the Republic of Korea, one of the most prosperous in all of Asia. Japan is soon hard hit by February, and the first cases show up in the United States in late February in Seattle, Washington, San Francisco, North California, and New York City.
It's at this point that President Howard orders the borders closed to all US and Mexican traffic and orders all Americans and Mexicans to leave the Confederacy. Belize closes its borders with Mexico north and west, and Guatemala to the southwest. The Labor Party, a small left-wing party in the Confederacy in a few states, sued the President, the case making it all the way to the Confederate Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Thomas delivered the 7-2 decision that the Confederate President can close the borders to protect the Confederate States from invasions and pandemics, per the 30th Amendment, clause 1:
1. The President shall protect the Confederate States from invasion from other nations, and have the power to close the borders when necessary for the public safety.
This clause never specified that the power to close the border was due to an invasion, just for the 'public safety,' which meant that in case of a pandemic, the President could close the border. The dissent was split, one saying that the amendment meant only in case of invasion by a group of people, not a virus, and the other saying that there was no public safety concern at the moment.
Confederate Chief Justice Clarence Thomas, born in Savannah, GA.With the borders closed in mid-February and all Confederates having come home before the virus spread in China and Europe, the Confederates soon ordered ships leaving infected countries to be quarantined for 7 days, as the virus seemed to live on surfaces for up to 4 days, but President Howard wasn't going to take any chances. News broadcasters such as LBS (Louisiana Broadcasting Station) out of New Orleans, DTR (German-Texas Broadcasting), DNC (Dixie News Channel), and CBS (Confederate Broadcasting Station) had a variety of opinions in English, French, Spanish, and German, the four main languages of the Confederate States, but more often than not praising President Howard for closing the borders. Reports that the incubation period was only 14 days, unfortunately led to an outbreak in Los Angeles, a town of around 683,000 in California. Governor James Kwan ordered the city quarantined, closing all roads into the town three days after hearing about it.
Governor Kwan of CaliforniaPer his order, the town of Los Angeles was shut down to traffic, while shipments into the town of food and water were allowed, only by trucks loaded with shipping containers, and when they left the town the trucks and containers were also submitted to virucidal sprays (bleach, UV light, etc). Through experience, the Confederates found it had an incubation period of 27 days, and at this time, Arizona and Sonora closed their borders to Californians looking to cross over to escape the virus. Kwan at this point ordered a stay-home order for all but necessary traffic, and for Los Angeles to avoid crowds or going out unless for take-out food only, groceries, or gasoline. Groceries would be ordered online via app, and customers would come to pick them up, and they would be placed in the trunks of the customers' cars. Unfortunately, food, toilet paper, and disinfectant shortages started showing up by mid-March in California, but the number of cases of the virus were limited to about 89. Soon, Confederate scientists in Nashville who had flown to California to help their fellow Confederates discovered that a series of high-intensity Vitamin C IV doses, along with azithromicin and quiticoline (a zinc, nano-silver, K2, D3, antiviral with vitamin shot) worked to cure the virus completely by early April. By mid-April, the numbers of infections in the Confederate States were going down and those cured were kept in observation until mid-May to ensure they wouldn't carry a dormant strain with them to infect others.
Up in the United States, however, President Clifton declared that it would be racist to ban Chinese people from coming into the United States based on their country of origin, allowing flights from China until late February, including numerous people from Harbin, where the virus originated, and from Siberian Russia, Mongolia, Japan, and Korea. By February 29, the border was closed. But by mid-March, cases began showing up in Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, New York, Detroit, and Boston, and soon, Washington, DC. Governors began issuing orders to stay at home across the country, while the CDC in Columbus, Ohio sent out faulty test kits that gave false positives and negatives, corrected nearly a month later, when the virus had spread throughout the United States and Canada to the north. By late March, in the United States, the media was finally showing updates on infections, death tolls, and recovered persons, though there was a two week period when they failed to update the numbers; by mid-April it would turn out that the director of the CDC was a donor to Heather Clifton's presidential campaign and was trying not to make her look bad, forcing his resignation. The President dismissed the Confederate claims of a cure, saying that 'nothing good ever came out of the South, which is why we let them leave.' However news agencies continued pressing the issue, and eventually, Vice President Sanders was sent to investigate the possibility on April 13. He reported that it might be useful but that the CDC would need to do testing to come up with a vaccine. A vaccine in the United States typically took at least 18 months with safety trials, causing an uproar, given that the Confederates were seeing lower infection rates.
Having taken office in 2018, President Howard and her Vice President Rick Koznicki, having cured the virus in the Confederacy, enjoyed very high approval levels for the rest of her term, with the Confederate Party, and its coalition partners the Conservation Party, Conservative Party, and Libertarian Party forming a majority in the Confederate Congress, while the Democrat Party, Green Party, and Social Democrat Party having only a little over a third of the seats in Congress.
Later it was found out by intelligence work through Wikileaks that North China released the virus with help from the United States to crack down on their dissidents, and through dealings with Clifton's husband and the Clifton Global Council charity, to bring the virus into the United States to try to crash the economy and help to bring in forced vaccinations (with untested vaccines) and close down gun stores to side-step the 2nd amendment, and increase central control of the country. Clifton ended her second term with a devastating loss for her party, a 45-state-landslide defeat, and criminal indictments hanging over the heads of many of the people in her administration.
