My branch at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta by day looked much the same as it did by night. Which is to say: more than four months since the death of Patient Zero, a reduced number of people worked in the building, but the ones who showed up toiled around the clock. Many of the faces I’d seen every day for years were absent, most having been deemed able to work from home. In their places, a new but smaller crop of faces appeared.

Like many complex organizations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consists of a structured hierarchy. A lot of people don’t realize it, but the first letter of the acronym CDC stands for the word Centers, not Center. My center, the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD), further breaks down into divisions and then into branches. Then, within the branch, you have specific teams, and within those teams, you have leaders and, finally, various job titles.

All that to say: people who don’t work at the CDC have a tendency to assume everyone there knows one another, not realizing perhaps that employees of the CDC number more than ten thousand. Meanwhile, people who work here might not know anyone outside their branch, let alone someone from a different center. Not to mention the fact that recognizing someone only from the nose up is harder than you might think.

It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that I had no idea of the identity of the person who’d just offered me a salute as we crossed paths in the hallway. “Keep the faith, Dr. M,” he yelled from behind his mask, not breaking stride.

That was . . . a lot of energy for so early in the morning. Still, I was grateful for the support. My new visibility had resulted in quite a bit of downside. Now that I’d appeared several times on television, every armchair virologist in America felt as if they not only knew me but were qualified to weigh in with their opinion on my opinions. Given that most of their opinions seemed to have hatched from the bowels of some anti-government sociopath on Twitter, this had become unpleasant.

Early on, Wally and I had been summoned to a virtual task force meeting with the CDC Washington director, the chief strategy officer/COO, and the deputy director of the whole shebang, along with a slew of other luminaries, in which we’d been informed that the federal government was arranging for us to have a security detail. Immediately, we’d both protested. Wally, especially, seemed to find this proposal emasculating.