If there was indeed a massive outbreak of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections, the government and CDC would do little or nothing.
Why? Because they no longer function in any recognizable form. A severe outbreak of bacterial disease could only happen if these institutions have collapsed.
Antibiotics are not critical to keeping society safe from bacterial infections. They merely clean up the gaps and failures of our public health system. As long as these systems provide clean water, clean food and vaccines to the public, we can control deaths from bacterial infections.
Deaths from infectious disease had dropped 10–fold from historical levels by the time penicillin was introduced, and would have continued to drop further in its absence.
As long as we have functioning public health systems, we are not going back to the Dark Ages. But if we don’t have those systems, the Dark Ages have already arrived, and antibiotic resistance will be among the least of our worries. Violent death and starvation will be much more pressing problems.
The one plausible doomsday scenario for bacterial infections is that new, more-virulent antibiotic resistant strains of TB evolve. TB deaths were once the leading cause of mortality in European cities, but began dropping even earlier than deaths from other bacterial infections. Nobody really knows why
From Progress with TB or a Return to the Dark Ages?
The best guess, in my view, is that the selective pressure exerted by TB was so intense that exposed populations evolved resistance to it. But if we know anything about the dynamics of host-parasite evolution, it is that the bugs will evolve in response and neutralize our new defenses. A hyper-virulent and multi-drug resistant TB strain that begins spreading through our cities – where most humans now live – could be uncontrollable.
MRSAs and CREs are bad bugs, to be sure. But they are completely controllable even in the absence of effective antibiotics. TB could be a different story.