Three years ago, almost exactly, the first cases of an “atypical pneumonia” began to appear at hospitals in Wuhan, China. Two years and eleven months ago, the agent causing those cases was identified, as a “novel” coronavirus, and its genome sequence was released to the world, thanks to the work and the courage of a scientist named Yong-Zhen Zhang and his colleagues in Shanghai and Sydney, Australia. The virus was “novel” in the sense that it had never before been detected in humans. A month later, it had a name, conferred by the World Health Organization; it was dubbed SARS-CoV-2, and the disease that it causes became Covid-19. One month more and the WHO declared officially what disease scientists already well knew: that Covid-19 was a pandemic.
It still is a pandemic. The virus is everywhere, it is still transmitting swiftly and invisibly from person to person, it is still causing serious disease among susceptible people, and it is still causing death—roughly 1,500 deaths each day in the world, as I write this. If that doesn’t constitute a “pandemic,” how would you define the word? Some sensible people, including Joe Biden, have said, “The pandemic is over.” This cheerful declaration is sometimes supported by saying that the virus has entered its “endemic” phase, a situation supposedly less severe and alarming than pandemic. But what does “endemic” mean? That the dangerous thing remains permanently present in a particular area, and disease outbreaks there will be continuous or recurrent. Should that be reassuring as applied to Covid-19? Not very. What’s to be the “particular area” of Covid-19 endemicity? Planet Earth. Does this mean that we no longer need concern ourselves with the virus? No. Malaria (not a viral disease, but an ancient killer) is endemic to sub-Saharan Africa and it still causes a half million deaths there every year. Endemicity is not the name of a long-term solution to Covid-19. It’s the name of a fatalism reflecting absence of a long-term solution.
Another form of false reassurance, sometimes offered by half-informed people, is that this virus like other viruses will grow less virulent over time, less harmful to people, as it reaches accommodation with its human hosts. It will shrink in ferocity and become merely a nuisance, like viruses causing the common cold. Aren’t some of those cold viruses also coronaviruses themselves?
Yes . . . but. It’s true that four other coronaviruses do infect humans, causing respiratory symptoms like a common cold—their names are 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1. But none of those four seems to have been ferocious when it first infected people, none are known to have caused an initial pandemic, and none are known to have evolved toward being milder in humans. (That list doesn’t include SARS-CoV-1, the original SARS virus of 2003, or the MERS coronavirus, which is another killer.) In fact, the whole notion that viruses necessarily evolve toward lesser virulence in humans is a mistake, based on failure to understand the basics of evolutionary theory. So long as a certain strain of virus is achieving successful transmission—infecting more people—it will be favoured by evolution, whether it kills its victims or not. Darwinian natural selection has no say in the fate of infected people after they have passed the virus along. If a milder variant of the virus proves more successful at transmission, if it infects more people more quickly, that variant will spread and predominate, yes. And it’s possible that the Omicron variant reflects that principle, being less lethal than the dominant variant preceding it, Delta. But even Omicron is still killing people today and, as it diversifies wildly, exploring other possible avenues to evolutionary success.
This virus, safe to say, will never be eradicated from the human population. Eradication of a human-infecting virus is rare, a very high goal, and though we have achieved that with smallpox, we have failed to achieve eradication of the measles virus or the polio virus, despite decades of concerted and expensive efforts. Furthermore, measles and polio are both human-only viruses, not zoonotic pathogens (which pass between nonhuman animals and humans) that can also hide out in bats, rodents, or some other animal host. SARS-CoV-2 has shown itself to be an especially versatile virus, capable of infecting not just people but also dogs, cats, tigers, lions, snow leopards, gorillas, hamsters, and mink, among other mammals. It has gone back to the wild in some creatures, notably white-tailed deer in the American Midwest. By now it’s all around us. SARS-CoV-2 will be part of the human future, not just a bad memory from the years 2019-2022.
But we can deal with it. We can constrain it, as we have constrained polio and measles and other formidable viral enemies. We have science and money on our side—we need to trust and support the former, and to spend boldly of the latter. We have intelligence and wisdom—yes, even nonscientists like you and me! We need to spend those resources also, by electing national leaders who appreciate the seriousness of this problem, by filling the airwaves and the internet with accurate journalism and rational commentary (to weigh against all the misinformation and melodramatic falsity), and by educating our children, even from a relatively young age, in the wonders and realities of science, and in history, and in critical thinking.
Is it possible to educate an 11-year-old girl or boy in critical thinking? I believe it is. You start by alerting them to two tools of discourse and judgment, tools that already exist in their vocabularies. You encourage them to apply those tools whenever they read, hear, or encounter a dramatic or suspect assertion. The first tool is the question Why? The second tool is the question How do you know?
We are all tired of Covid-19, but we still have work to do. We need to steel ourselves for the continuing battle against this virus, and to prepare ourselves for the next one, still another “novel” virus that will appear among humans in a year, or in five years, or in ten. Meanwhile, before that next pandemic threat arrives, we need to strengthen our national capacities in health care for all, and our international support for training of health-care professionals and disease scientists (including veterinarians) in low- and middle-income countries; we need to bolster the international networks of pathogen detection and outbreak surveillance that exist, and to vastly increase the number of tendrils in those networks, so that menacing disease events can be detected early and contained; and we need to be more watchful especially at all the dangerous places where humans come into disruptive contact with natural ecosystems, including wildlife and the viruses they carry.
We can’t allow ourselves to be so tired that we close our eyes, sleepily, to the lessons of Covid-19. Take a deep breath, with the turn of the new year, 2023, and onward we go. We will summon our strength and determination. I think the word in Italian is inesauribile? We will be inexhaustible.
