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We made a coronavirus epidemic

There are many discussions about the structure of the virus, its infectivity and ways to combat it. And it is right. But somehow little attention is paid to an equally important topic - the causes of the coronavirus pandemic. And if you do not understand the reason and do not draw the appropriate conclusions, as it was after the previous epidemics of coronaviruses, then the next major outbreak will not take long.

An understanding must finally come that the current irresponsible and consumer attitude of people towards each other and the environment has already exhausted itself. And no one can feel safe. In today's world, it is impossible to create “your own,” well-being separate from other people and wildlife. When 821 million people regularly go hungry (according to the latest UN data), while others enjoy traveling and tropical beauties, throwing out a third of the produced products in the trash, this can not end with anything good. Humanity can normally exist only in the model of “One world, one health” (One world, one health). In which there is no consumer relationship, but there is a rational approach to the mutually beneficial existence of the entire ecosystem of the Earth.

An article by David Quamman in The New York Times about this.

We made a coronavirus epidemic


It may have started with a bat in a cave, but it was human activity that started the process.

The name, chosen by a group of Chinese scientists who isolated and identified the virus, abbreviated as “the new coronavirus of 2019,” nCoV-2019. (The article was published even before the virus was given its current name SARS-Cov-2 - A.R. ).

Despite the name of the new virus, as the people who called it so well know, nCoV-2019 is not as new as you think.

Something similar was found several years ago in a cave in Yunnan, about a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan, by a group of discerning researchers who noted with concern their discovery. The rapid spread of nCo2V-019 is amazing, but not unpredictable. The fact that the virus did not originate in humans, but in animals, possibly a bat, and, possibly, after passing through another creature, may seem surprising. But this is not surprising for scientists who study such things.

One such scientist is Dr. Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who gave nCoV-2019 his name. It was Zheng-Li Shi and colleagues in 2005 who showed that the causative agent of SARS is the bat virus that has got into people. Since then, this team of scientists has been tracking coronaviruses in bats, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause a pandemic among humans.

In a 2017 article, they described how, after almost five years of collecting feces from bats in Yunnan Cave, they found coronaviruses in several individuals of four different species of bats, including a horseshoe bats. According to scientists, the genome of this virus is 96 percent identical to the virus from Wuhan, recently discovered in humans. And these two make up a pair different from all other known coronaviruses, including one that causes SARS. In this sense, nCoV-2019 is new and possibly even more dangerous to humans than other coronaviruses.

Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based privately held research organization dedicated to the relationship between human health and wildlife, is one of Dr. Zheng-Li Shi's long-standing partners. “We have been sounding the alarm about these viruses for 15 years,” he said with calm disappointment. “Since SARS came about.” He co-authored a 2005 study of bats and SARS and a 2017 article on multiple SARS-like coronaviruses in Yunnan Cave.

Mr. Daszak said that during this second study, the field team took blood samples from two thousand young people, about 400 of whom lived near the cave. About 3 percent of them had antibodies against coronaviruses similar to SARS.

“We don’t know if they got sick. But this tells us that these viruses repeatedly pass from bats to humans. ” In other words, this emergency in Wuhan is not a new event. This is part of a series of related contingencies that are a thing of the past and will continue in the future as long as current circumstances persist.

So when you finish worrying about this outbreak, worry about the next. Or do something with current circumstances.

Current circumstances include the dangerous trade in wildlife and food, with supply chains passing through Asia, Africa and, to a lesser extent, the United States and other countries. This trade in China has been outlawed on a temporary basis. But it also happened during SARS, and then it was again allowed to trade - bats, civet, porcupines, turtles, bamboo rats, many species of birds and other animals piled together in markets such as Wuhan.

Current circumstances also include 7.6 billion people on Earth who constantly need food. Some of them are poor and desperate for protein. Others - rich and wasteful, can afford to travel to different parts of the planet on airplanes. These factors are unprecedented on planet Earth: from the fossil record, we know that not a single large-sized animal has ever been as numerous as people are now. And one of the consequences of this abundance, this power and related environmental disruptions is an increase in viral metabolism - first from animal to person, then from person to person, sometimes on a pandemic scale.

We are invading tropical forests and other wild landscapes with so many species of animals and plants, and so many unknown viruses inside them. We chop trees; we kill animals or put them in a cage and send them to the markets. We destroy ecosystems and shake off viruses from their natural hosts. When this happens, they need a new host. Often it is we.

The list of such viruses appearing in humans sounds like a gloomy drum beat: Machupo, Bolivia, 1961; Marburg, Germany, 1967; Ebola, Zaire and Sudan, 1976; HIV, in New York and California, 1981; Hunt form (now known as Sin Nombre), southwestern United States, 1993; Hendra, Australia, 1994; bird flu, Hong Kong 1997; Nipah, Malaysia, 1998; West Nile, New York, 1999; SARS, China, 2002-3; MERS, Saudi Arabia, 2012; Again Ebola, West Africa, 2014. And this is only selective. Now we have nCoV-2019, the last drum hit.

Current circumstances also include bureaucrats who lie and hide bad news, and elected officials who brag to the crowd about deforestation to create jobs in the forest industry and agriculture or to cut health and research budgets. The distance from Wuhan or the Amazon to Paris, Toronto or Washington is small for some viruses, measured in hours, given how well they can travel with aircraft passengers. And if you think financing for pandemic preparedness is expensive, wait until you see the final cost of the current pandemic.

Fortunately, current circumstances also include brilliant, dedicated scientists and outbreak response experts - such as scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the EcoHealth Alliance, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), China CDC and many others institutions. These are people who go to bat caves, to swamps, and to laboratories with a high level of safety, often risking their lives to get feces, blood, and other valuable evidence to study genomic sequences and answer key questions.

As the number of cases of new coronavirus infection has increased, and the number of deaths with it, one indicator, the mortality rate, has still remained fairly stable: about or below 3 percent. This is relative luck - worse than most flu strains, better than SARS.

This luck cannot last long. No one knows what the development will be. Six months later, Wuhan pneumonia may go down in history. Or not.

We face two serious challenges, in the short and long term. Short-term: we must do our best, wisely, calmly and fully devote resources to contain and extinguish this outbreak of nCoV-2019 before it becomes, as it can, a devastating global pandemic. In the long run: we must remember that when the dust settles, nCoV-2019 was not a new event or disaster that befell us. It was part of a model of choice that we humans make ourselves.

Translation: A. Rzheshevsky.

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