People are stupid. That's what happens when you make it some kind of shameful secret.
Worse. Kellis-Amberlee is a mutated, manmade virus. The cure for the common cold and cancer, actually. It zombifies everyone after death. Sometimes randomly too. Everybody when we're from has it. When it showed up, billions of people died. So we sort of take outbreaks and illness pretty seriously, culturally.
Economically, you're in for a hard time, but you won't be going back to war.