The Sunrise Plague had been based on a Pseudomimivirus.

There were still good people at CDD. They were the same specialists who had saved the world in 2017. They quickly resolved the July 23 issue. Public Relations could now spin a more or less accurate statement: Yes, this Pseudomimi had evaded the standard announcement protocols. The failure was a simple software error at the Center's "Current Events" website. And yes, this Pseudomimi might be a derivative of the Sunrise Plague. Denatured strains of the original, death-optimized, virus continued to echo around the world, a permanent addition to the background noise of the biosphere. Three had already been sighted that year, one just five days before, on July 18. Furthermore (and here the public-relations people regained their usual elan), all such events were subclinical, having essentially no perceptible symptoms. The Pseudomimiviruses had an enormous genome (well, enormous for a virus, small for almost anything else). The New Sunrise cult had transformed that genome into a Swiss Army knife of death, with a tool to counter almost every defense. But without such optimization, the Pseudomimis were clunky bags of DNA junk. "And so, in conclusion, we at CDD apologize for failing to announce this routine event."

A week passed. Two weeks. There were no further captures of the organism. Antibody surveys showed that the epidemic never got much farther than the rim of the Mediterranean. CDD's claims for the outbreak were absolutely correct. This kind of "subclinical respiratory epidemic" was almost a contradiction in terms. If not one victim in a thousand even gets the sniffles, the virus is almost dependent on charity to make its way in the world.

The CDD explanations were accepted. The public-health hobbyists had been scaremongering a commonplace event.