Well, we also really have to look at th 1300’s as a whole. This was a BAD time to be alive. A series of famines and animal murrains had already screwed everyone around for thirty years or so before the plague even showed up, and the decade 1310 to 1319 is the worst decade of famine in European history, so people were already not having much fun. Plague is NOT indigenous to Europe. The Black Death came from the far east where the second Pandemic began in the 1330’s. The first Christian community to record it was some Nestorian Christians in India in 1335 (I think the year is right, i don’t have my thesis handy). By 1349, the entire Muslim world was infected. Reached Europe in August/September 1347 and lasted that time until 1350ish. Pope Clement VI (who survived, although 3 archbishops of Canterbury were not so lucky) estimated the pre-plague population of Europe at roughly 78,000,000 and the plague killed roughly a third of Europe’s population by 1351 (when England’s first ever sanitation laws were enacted, cool, huh?). What we forget is that the pandemic works in cycles. Let’s look at England: The Plague came back in 1360-61 and took another 20% of who was left, 1369 with 13% mortality, 1390 10%, 1399 10%, and at least 12 national epidemics in the 1400’s, including 1479-80 15-20% mortality. This is in addition to local epidemics that happened somewhere every couple of years. This is a BAD disease, and guess what? It’s NOT going to become an epidemic in NYC. For one thing, Y. Pestis (the bacillus) is not native to the area, so it’d be tough to start. For another, as stated before, rats don’t go for people that often, and, much more importantly, neither really do fleas if you have reasonably good sanitation habits. You can’t catch bubonic plague from another person, and it’s fairly curable now, as pointed out, and even with no cure, roughly 50% fatal, but YOU HAVE TO GET IT FIRST. When I was working on my thesis in the 80’s, there were theories that pneumonic plague occured after sharp temperature drops when the bacillus could enter the lungs, but they weren’t sure. If there’s been progress here, someone can please enlighten me. Also, since pneumonic plague is so virulent, it tends to kill it’s hosts before they can really get it spreading, which is a no no if you’re a future oriented virus.
BUT, you could do like in the movies and bring black rats (rattus rattus, I love that) to New York, with plague samples from Nevada or Manchuria, train the rats to actively seek close human contact, and, when the whole thing gets started, move the earth slightly out of orbit so we get that sudden temperature drop and then, my friends, we just might get that Pneumonic plague epidemic. I hope no terrorists read that, because other than one minor obstacle, it shouldn’t be too hard, should it?