Covid-19, The Virus's Perspective

Opinion

Covid-19, From the Virus’s Perspective 

The virus has done well beyond its means in its chosen occupation, a success story if you will.

By: Rodrigo Servin

Mr. Servin is a student at Raisbeck Aviation High School

October 30, 2020

Photograph by CNN

Everyone can agree that Covid-19 has become a full-blown tragedy for humanity.  A tragedy just like the African dilemma tales of old, as expounded by Togo, with the morally questionable endings. But unlike in the tale Mirror, Sandals, and a Medicine Bag, we aren’t arguing which son brought the best gift to save their dying father, but whether the Chinese or President Trump is  more to blame for what has befallen us.  It is now us who are living with the morally gray conclusions of where it all went wrong.  While the devastation and magnitude of the virus reflect bad luck and a dangerous world, it is more a story of the total lack of preplanning and inability to put the needs of many over the few.

However, I ask you to look past these catastrophic mishandlings and instead consider the point of view of the virus.  Measure and analyze it from a completely non-biased perspective, in those terms, even Darwin himself would have been proud.

The now infamous virus started its life as an unremarkable organism, idling quietly in its host, most likely in a bat located in Wuhan, China.  The reason why this is of focus to scientists is that Covid-19 needs a logical explanation as to where it started.

Why?  Because everything has come from somewhere, and before this virus popped into the public consciousness with its first human case, it had been quietly lurking somewhere else.  The organism which a virus inhabits is called a natural reservoir, which is simply the population and or community which a virus calls home.  Now viruses’ are not living things, as, without a host to inhabit it cannot replicate itself and begin life, in essence, it is a genetic code that needs somebody else’s hardware to run.

The virus and host have an unwritten contract as old as time, and I’m sure you’ve heard of the bacteria that inhabit your stomach and help you process food which make full use of this contract.  The virus lives within the reservoir, staying low and keeping its own population inline and in doing so it secures itself safety within the host.  This is the life of most viruses.  They have a modest outlook and most likely will spend their entire lives confined to a relatively small select population allowing it to focus on just maintaining its population

However, this agreement is not seeded in perpetuity and can turn volatile extremely quickly.  The virus’ host can be eaten or simply in close contact with other species’ and this presents the virus with a new opportunity, another reservoir.

All of a sudden it’s like Aoshima.  Aoshima is an island near Japan with a huge population of cats that were introduced by fishermen to kill rodents.  These cats found themselves on this island with a large food source and managed to seemingly exponentially grow.  This is also how viruses act, they hop to a new island, they may die out from lack of food or too harsh conditions, but if they find the new environment suits them well, they might just establish themself there, and not just in a single individual but the entire population.

The cats may just find that they can expand to other islands just as viruses may find they can expand into other select cells of their population.  It may find great success doing this and have its population explode exponentially.  Imagine if that island was also inhabited by rabbits and the cats figure out new ways to catch them, their population would continue to grow, and this would be a tale of the cats’ successful DNA and evolutionary process.

Now if this island is a human and the virus originates from an animal it’s called a zoonotic virus and is why we call these infection zoonosis diseases.  These origins are shared by the majority of current-day viruses that inhabit humans, making up 60% of them.

Now the viruses have no personal vendetta against us, they are just acting in line with Darwin’s fundamental principle just as the cats do, to expand themselves as much as physically possible and in as great abundance as possible.  For an indeterminate virus hiding in a bat or some sort of nonhuman primate expanding itself to infect humans represents a new horizon.

This is where Ebola comes into play, while scientists still are not completely sure as to exactly where Ebola came from though through examining similar viruses origins it most likely came from a bat or nonhuman primate according to the Center for Disease Control.  So the uqestion stands, why and how did Ebola spread to human?  The United Nations warned last year that over one million plant and animal species were on the verge of extinction.  In addition, the World Wildlife Fund estimated that a collection of 4,400 mammals, amphibians, fish, birds, and reptiles have seen populations decline 68 percent since 1970.  This all while urbanization has seen unparalleled growth and the human population continues its upward trends.  Bats and nonhuman primates like much of the multi-celled organisms on this planet have seen a massive decline in population.  These animals gave Ebola a home, but now with their quickly approaching demise, Ebola is left with two options: die out, or find a new reservoir.  It chose the latter obviously, and in a world where the majority of multi-celled organisms seem to be in decline, humanity shines as one of the sole outposts of hope for viruses.

Covid-19 has done likewise, though its success far outstrips that of Ebola, and it has happened much more quickly.  The virus has infected over 45 million people worldwide, and is still growing at breakneck speed.  While not the fastest or deadliest virus on this planet we’ve seen, it should definitely be a cause for pause.

According to National Geographic, there are as many as 1.6 million viruses completely undetected currently living in mammals and birds.  Simon Anthony, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University spends his time looking for novel viruses all around the world.  In 2018 he worked with an organization called PREDICT that discovered a new Ebola virus called Bombali coming from free-tailed bats that would roost in the homes of people in Sierra Leone.  While no one will know whether Bombali goes on to become the next Covid-19 or not, but among 1.6 million other viruses odds of another one coming for us are almost certain.  Bombali could easily infect a family in Sierra Leone, going on to infect people internationally.  With humans’ ever-increasing footprint chances of coming into contact with these diseases fleeing their declining reservoirs seems more and more likely.

A new study by Dr Xiaowei Jiang of Xi'an of Jiaotong-Liverpool University's Department of Biological Sciences makes the claim that Covid-19 and other coronaviruses like it may have a preadapted ability making it have a higher chance of humans contracting future coronaviruses.

"After carefully removing the effects of recombination in the sarbecovirus genomes using sophisticated bioinformatics methods, our subsequent evolutionary analysis supports that this virus is likely the result of a direct or nearly direct zoonotic leap from bats," said Dr. Jiang.  When the doctor says “nearly direct zoonotic leap” he is essentially saying that the entire family of coronavirus could infect humans with minimal evolution required.  This is bad luck for all homosapiens, but evolution isn’t here to please us.

Covid-19 has made a great move that has benefited its chances of survival mightily.  It is already well on its way to achieving what Darwinian evolution wants it to which is an abundant population with very minimal chances of ever being completely eliminated.

Will, we ever find a way to eliminate Covid-19 in humans totally?  Probably not.  Will we get past the harrowing life of lockdown?  Yes.