Rebuilding. The capital city, Stonechapel, is largely rebuilt, but in order to get the city back to normal they had to siphon people from other cities. Stonechapel's population is just a smidge over 55 million.
A lot of other cities are either in various states of being rebuilt (very slow when the population gets cut in half!), or they're nearly on a ghost-town level where it's just accepted that certain districts will never be rebuilt or cleared. That, or they're literal holes in the ground. With an estimated two and a half billion war dead, there's also a lot of places and bodies that just aren't accounted for.
The interdiction fleet means that no ships can get in or out without permission, but seeing as there are no starports (and any attempt to build one gets "discouraged" by the nearest cruiser), it won't do much good anyway. As a result, unless the interdiction fleet lifts, the planet will be facing famine in three years at most.
I explained it in rather a lot more detail to Sargy when we were hammering out the important points together, but suffice it to say that the planet's a bit screwed.
Oh, and one teensy little thing about Ambrose's prologue-post; you might want to run back over the dates. The vid-capture was received in 008.M42, so I'll grant you that, but there was a delay of fifteen years between the vid-capture having been made and it having been received.
