Mercury Protocol Invoked

As of 14 OCT 2016, the Maryland team had been incommunicado for at least 90 days. As a result, in accordance with contingency program seven, the Mercury Protocol has been invoked. Remote reporting from an undisclosed and less at-risk site commences with this broadcast. It should be noted that a thorough data-scrub has been conducted, and that all data roll-over systems functioned nominally; there has been no data lost as a result of this incident.

While every effort will be made to recover news and detail of the Maryland core team, we fear they have been lost.

Much has happened since the last report. Maryland reported 1798 hits before they went offline; Massachusetts reported 1445. The entire northeast region, from the tidewater states up to southern New England, suffered 6022 hits. There was a somewhat similar effect on the west coast, with 669 hits in California, and 225 in Washington; Ohio, Kansas and Florida were the other heavy hitters in the states. We had reports from all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico with a total of 9176 sightings.

Things are not much better to the north, with 876 hits in Canada. To the south, there was minimal activity in Mexico, Honduras, Peru and Brazil.

Europe continues to suffer greatly, with 1077 reports in the Balkan states, and 1168 reports in north central Europe including the UK. The northern tier did not do much better, although Sweden had significantly less activity than Norway or Finland. Finland was a real hotspot with 1425 reports.

There were new outbreaks in central Africa, with Rwanda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo submitting their first reported cases. There were a number of other new places that reported sightings as well; everything listed below Iceland on the dispersion map page (underneath the map) was new this period.

Southeast Asia featured new areas affected as well: Malaysia and the Philippines. Australia had some significant activity with 223 hits.

Overall there were 14,416 sightings around the world in 56 countries. 218 of the 353 known ZTBs were sighted during this period. 12 were reported missing.

Stay safe out there.