Covid19 has struck New York City and it is reeling with the impact.
The Governor is calling on the President to use laws to force manufacturers to produce medical equipment so desperately needed to treat the sick.
A few years ago I wandered through Central Park and wondered how the city would react if a virus was let loose inside it.
How would it cope?
I then wrote Silent Lips, at thriller about NYC struck by such a disease.
The President orders the city quarantined, and the Army sets up a Parklab in Central Park, where doctors from inside the city frantically try to find a cure for the spreading disease.
Other doctors fly into the city, knowing they will be unable to leave it, but coming to help.
You can read excerpts of Silent Lips at my Amazon Author Page at this site (click on the eBook Silent Lips picture to see the excerpts): https://www.amazon.com/author/glennashton
Here is the chapter describing the setting up of the Parklab.
The ParkLab, Central Park
The sweeping of Central Park started at nine at night, with the first troops driving into the middle of the Great Lawn next to the lake in jeeps and half tracks, and fanned out from this central point, pushing towards the boundaries of the Park.
They formed lines three deep and moved through the trees and bushes, their handheld lights probing every bush and behind each rock, their fixed bayonets forcing the people they found out from the Lawn, towards the edges of the Park.
Lights were spaced at regular intervals around the lawn and the edges of the Park, facing outwards.
Further back, batteries of searchlights were mounted with their beams at low angles to allow them to cover the ground.
Behind the sweep teams, other troops unrolled the barbed wire that was to be strung along the Park's boundaries to keep the New Yorkers out of the area.
Moveable steel barriers were erected in front of the barbed wire to keep the crowds that were expected to arrive the next day off the barbs of the wire.
By seven an area a half-mile square had been secured, and teams of sappers started throwing up the guard posts every hundred yards apart. Made of metal cylinders with firing slits cut in at three heights, they had their own independent backup generators to power their lights in case of a general power failure. Each one had a telephone link to the central command post that was situated to one side of the Great Lawn, as well as portable radio communications.
Their fields of vision overlapped so that the whole perimeter of the Parklab was under surveillance.
