Tuesday 24 March 2020

See the CORONA COVID-19 Pandemic from the Sars-Cov2 Virus Point of View


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Just a little thought exercise: 


Imagine you are a Sars-Cov2 virus, i.e., a Corona Virus, COVID-19 or Wuhan-virus or Chinese Virus (as the president of a certain country insists on calling me). 


So, who am I? Coronaviruses (COVs) infect human and animals, causing mainly respiratory, enteric, renal, and neurological diseases.




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There are four genera of these: alpha-COV, beta-COV, gamma-COV, and delta-COV. And here's my pedigree, so you know what you're signing up for. I belong to the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. 

Proudly, I can say that I am the largest among known RNA viruses


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Records of my family history go back to 10 000 BCE and I have about 200 siblings. You really don't want to mess with some one them e.g, Ebola with 90% kill rates. I'm one of the smartest viruses in the family as I don't kill the carrier hosts that fast, so I get to spread far and wide and so I can put the biped carbon-based life-form's entire civilisation in a crisis. 

In this century, there's been already 3 zoonotic outbreaks of beta-COVs: 

  1. SARS-CoV in 2002-2003
  2. MERS-CoV in 2012, Saudi Arabia
  3. SARS-CoV-2 in 2019, Wuhan, China  
But, overall it's been about a hundred years since the planet has had a pandemic of such magnitude as the current pandemic and this has left everyone clueless about how to handle it. Only countries with recent experience of epidemics like SARS have managed better.

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Though the exact genetic code mutation is new, I have lived since times immemorial in the bodies of wild animals in the deep forests. It was a symbiosis agreement. I didn’t kill them and they didn’t start eradicating me.

Only recently, humans, a biped carbon-based life-form began decimating the deep forests and capturing these wild life-forms, often for aphrodisiacs


Now what is left of our deep forest home, looks mostly like this: 



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Really, can anyone live there now?


It's not that these biped carbon-based lifeforms is on any endangered species list or under any threat, in fact they  have grow by 18 million this year.


Their environment footprint is entirely out of proportion and has pushed the planet almost beyond the planetary boundaries. I, Sars-Cov2 virus, along with other compatriots am now homeless and host-less. 



Think of it, as a living organism, who would want to just die out? So, what is the only viable option? In a rapidly changing digital environment, change of residence into a mobile host is a smart move. As I am a zoonotic virus, I can transfer from animals to humans pretty quickly, I can also move from the upper-respiratory tract of humans to the lower, unlike some other viruses, and things have begun to look like this, unfortunately for the biped carbon-based life-forms.

You break my home, biped carbon-based life-form (humans), I move into yours, what’s unfair about that? I come as a pandemic (you make it an infodemic!), so I'm in for a long stay.


Unfortunately, the carbon-based life-forms denied that the Covid-19 was a serious outbreak.





Then, you can easily understand, how not only the behaviour responsible for creating this problem was swept under the carpet, but a policy of denial continued. Now, what can a virus like me do about such callousness!




So, dear biped carbon-based life-form (aka human), give me back my home and hosts, and let me live undisturbed in them, then I’ll bless your home and leave and the Covid-19 pandemic ends soon. 

Fair deal, huh? 


Now, how likely is that? Well, there are some signs that some countries are trying to wake up and ban wildlife hunting.




If you want to do your part to help, you can sign this petition.