Moscow

Moscow enters the novel’s account of the Georgia Flu as the point of departure for a flight whose passengers arrive in Toronto already ill. The city’s significance is not that the evidence proves the disease began there, but that the flight links a distant, still poorly understood crisis to an emerging cluster of cases in Canada—and then to transmission beyond the plane.

A City Named Through Departure

When Jeevan speaks with his friend Hua, news of an alarming new flu in the Republic of Georgia is circulating amid conflicting reports about mortality and the death toll. The reports remain sketchy, and the name Georgia Flu sounds to Jeevan almost deceptively pretty. Moscow is introduced in this uncertain setting: Hua’s first patient is a sixteen-year-old girl who flew from there the previous night and came to the emergency room with flu symptoms early that morning.

The Flight and the First Cluster

By midmorning, Hua has twelve more patients with the same symptoms. They are not relatives or friends of the girl; their identified connection is that they all boarded the same flight out of Moscow. They report beginning to feel sick while still on the plane. The account therefore presents Moscow as the departure point of a shared journey, while locating the cluster’s detection in Toronto. It does not establish where any passenger contracted the illness or where the outbreak itself began.

Transmission Beyond the Passengers

That afternoon, another patient arrives with the same symptoms despite not having been on the flight. He is an airport gate agent, and Hua emphasizes that his only known contact with the passengers was speaking to one of them about where to board the hotel shuttle. The sequence extends the outbreak’s reach from the Moscow passengers to an airport employee through a brief, ordinary interaction; the reported connection makes the airport a point of concern without identifying any further source or chain of transmission.

From International Route to Local Emergency

News coverage subsequently reports that Toronto General Hospital and two other local hospitals have been placed under isolation, while Health Canada confirms an outbreak of the Georgia Flu. Officials are not yet releasing numbers, and the broadcast notes suggestions that Georgian and Russian officials have understated the crisis’s severity. These reports deepen the uncertainty surrounding the disease but do not resolve Moscow’s role beyond its place in the passengers’ itinerary. In the narrative, the city’s name marks how an international air route carries the crisis into a local emergency before its scale is fully known.