The Republic of Georgia enters the novel as the reported source of the Georgia Flu, a place known first through fragmentary news and the name attached to a rapidly widening emergency. Though the story does not depict events there directly, the reports from it set the catastrophe in motion: a distant outbreak becomes an immediate threat in Toronto, and eventually marks a divide between the connected world before the pandemic and the diminished world after it.

First Reports and the Name of the Flu

The first reports describe an alarming new flu in the Republic of Georgia, but the information is sketchy and mortality figures and death tolls conflict. News outlets have settled on the name Georgia Flu. To Jeevan Chaudhary, the name initially sounds disarmingly pretty, a brief aesthetic impression at odds with the severity soon conveyed by the reports. The distance between the name and the danger it comes to signify gives the outbreak an unsettlingly ordinary beginning: at first it is a story being followed, not yet a disaster being lived through.

The novel does not establish the Republic of Georgia as the verified site of a first infection or give a local account of the outbreak. Instead, it presents a reported point of origin whose early details remain uncertain. Later news suggests that Georgian and Russian officials may have disclosed less than they knew about the crisis. That suspicion deepens the importance of the first reports while leaving their reliability, and the full early scale of the outbreak, unresolved.

The Outbreak Reaches Toronto

The shift from distant report to local emergency comes through Hua, who tells Jeevan Chaudhary about a sixteen-year-old patient who flew from Moscow and arrived at the emergency room with flu symptoms. By midmorning, twelve more patients with the same symptoms have been identified; all were on that flight and say they became ill aboard it. The account links the outbreak reported in the Republic of Georgia to an international route and a hospital in Toronto, without claiming that the young patient herself travelled from the Republic.

The scale becomes stark within hours. Hua reports that Toronto has admitted more than two hundred flu patients since morning, including 160 in the preceding three hours, and that fifteen have died. The emergency department is full, beds have been placed in hallways, and Health Canada is about to make an announcement. Toronto General Hospital and two other local hospitals are placed under isolation, while public reporting confirms an outbreak of the Georgia Flu and fatalities but withholds the current numbers. The place first encountered through uncertain foreign news is now part of an emergency measured in overcrowded wards, deaths, and containment orders.

From International Movement to Forced Stillness

The early outbreak story is also a story about movement. The sick passengers arrive together by air, and in the first days of the crisis the possibility of leaving or crossing distance still shapes people’s decisions. Jeevan Chaudhary is told to leave immediately or, if he cannot, to stock food and stay in his apartment. He buys water and other supplies, then seals the apartment’s air ducts with plastic and blocks its door with a dresser as he and Frank endure knocks and attempted entry. The disease turns ordinary shared space and travel into sources of fear.

That mobility soon collapses. Kirsten Raymonde recalls that Toronto’s neighbourhoods were emptying; her brother Peter eventually hotwired an abandoned car, but traffic ramps and side roads were clogged with vehicles, leaving them to continue on foot. They travelled east and south, around the lake and into the United States, where the border was open because the guards had left. Jeevan Chaudhary, by contrast, resolved to follow the lake while avoiding roads and other people. Their different routes show movement becoming improvised and exposed: cars, roads, and national boundaries no longer reliably organize escape.

Air travel persists briefly as the crisis advances. Clark Thompson boards one of the final planes to leave John F. Kennedy International Airport, unaware of how close the flu already is; the flight diverts to Severn City Airport, where passengers encounter a quarantine order and a breakdown of ground transport. In the post-collapse world, aircraft no longer sustain routine travel: they stand dormant, collect snow, and are reused for food storage, while the Travelling Symphony’s former pickup trucks have been converted into horse-drawn caravans. The old networks of rapid movement give way to walking, animal-drawn transport, and local improvisation.

The Long Aftermath

The novel’s wider aftermath places the reported outbreak in the Republic of Georgia at the beginning of a transformation that outlasts the emergency itself. At the airport, survivors first approach strangers with the expectations of post-apocalyptic films and post guards with whistles; after a scouting party returns, Dolores instead feels relief at the sight of the terminal, which has become home. By the end of Year Fifteen, three hundred people live at Severn City Airport, and its former Skymiles Lounge houses the Museum of Civilization. A site once organized around transit has become a settlement and a repository for objects from the lost world.

The Republic of Georgia therefore functions less as a fully rendered setting than as the geographical beginning of a chain of reports, routes, and consequences. The outbreak’s early uncertainty contrasts with the precision of later losses: crowded hospitals, stranded passengers, abandoned roads, unmanned borders, and aircraft rusting in place. The novel makes the distant place matter through that widening contrast, as a name on the news becomes the marker of a world in which the systems that once connected places can no longer be taken for granted.