COVID-19, by the looks of it, is going nowhere; so, where do we go now?
A man gets vaccinated against COVID-19 at Nair hospital on Monday. Pic/Suresh Karkera
Corona, as a wit (Hussain Haidry) on Twitter points out, is like God: If you believe, he’s everywhere; if you don’t, he’s nowhere! Like God, I guess, we also know so little about Corona, while it keeps downgrading/upgrading its powers, with multiple incarnations (mutations), as the word spreads.
To a point that its subsequent strains can’t even quite be traced to its original avatar from Wuhan — the Chinese city, with a population similar to Bombay’s — where it all started.
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Now, regardless of whether you term it God, unknown forces hit us almost equally. We call it by other names, given our disposition — nature, universe, calamity, luck/destiny…
In his deeply accessible, sharply condensed book, COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction, written during the pandemic itself, author Anirban Mahapatra likens Corona (like all other pandemics) to an elephant — “described by nearly eight billion blind people, each grasping at one or few parts, and trying to make sense of the whole.”
Mahapatra’s admission without shame what he doesn’t know is touching. And that’s because he’s a microbiologist/scientist. As against a politician, or ‘god-man’ (or both). Because, you remember Yeats’ famous words: The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity!
Here’s what we do about Corona though. Or whatever little I’ve understood. That it is, of course, a virus. And one virus or the other has caused all the major pandemics in the last century of human history. Humans had in fact never seen/encountered a virus, up until frickin’ 1900 — identifying the first one as yellow fever.
We know of the infamous 1918-19 H1N1 influenza pandemic that wiped out anywhere between 40-100 million humans — 14 million in India alone (primarily, in its second wave). That virus, like most others, chiefly affected/marauded the really old and the really young.
SARS-CoV-2 that’s caused COVID-19, so far, holds a bias against older men, as against women in general — and it largely spares children. Extending visual analogy for its modus operandi, Mahapatra calls the spikes on SARS-CoV-2 as the key. What the virus is looking for inside the human body is the lock. These are receptor cells called ACE-2.
Soon as the key works, and the virus unlocks the receptor cell, what ensues inside the human body is plain warfare — with warning signals (such as fever) sent out, and an immune system that must fight the despicable foreign invasion. It’s a battle of survival for both.
For, a virus by definition is a parasite, needing a host to feed off and spread. And it travels from person to person, through released droplets on surfaces and air. Newer, deadly viruses necessarily transmit from animals to humans.
Could the loss of natural habitats and therefore closer proximity to wildlife make humans progressively more susceptible to novel viruses? Don’t know. There are currently over 200 viruses that infect humans.
Mahapatra believes this pandemic business has only begun. Maybe underestimating the significance of the last, 2009 swine flu pandemic (with around 600,000 deaths) was a terrible oversight.
Here’s the good news though. The virus is also a dumbass. Sure it can mutate and hoodwink in this lock-and-key game. But it only knows how to do one thing. Whereas humans, apart from their natural immunities, can attack it from outward posts as well.
Vaccines, according to Mahapatra, have traditionally taken over a decade (five years for Ebola was an exception) to come about. By which time enough humans have fallen by the wayside already.
SARS-CoV-2 got one in a matter of months. What does the vaccine do? Roughly simulate/alert the internal immune system to the existence of the virus. So when the real one attacks, it is battle-ready/equipped to clear it out swiftly.
HIV/AIDS still doesn’t have a vaccine. That’s because HIV can’t be cleared out by the body’s immune system alone — it needs stronger armour than a pre-training of human/internal simulation to see it through.
The vaccine in any case protects you from severity of the illness that follows, and not from the infection itself. There’s also a compelling theory, Mahapatra reveals, that our past infections of other viruses offer us partial immunity, possibly through “immune memory” alone.
Either way, this too shall pass — the pandemic will end — when, I’m guessing, we reach the optimal herd immunity as well. WHO will announce the closure, as it did its existence on March 11, 2020. But the virus will remain.
Here’s the flip side to humans, with their similar relation to God: Maano toh bhagwan; naa maano, toh patthar (If you believe, it’s God; else, stone!). It takes little for man to migrate back from an isolated island, into the huggy, touchy, feely social beings they’re naturally designed to be. Public memory is short.
We will instantly ‘unsee’ Corona, until we can see it again. The cycle will continue. True for most of us. The American experience of COVID-19, I’m told, has largely bent against the poor, particularly Blacks and Hispanics. In India at least, the virus didn’t quite differentiate between the rich and poor. It may have been kinder to the latter.
Imagine physical distancing inside a slum (that’s about half of Bombay), or even constantly accessing water to wash hands, with such little to drink. Maybe, in these parts, SARS-CoV-2 has been more the godless communist (saying this not just for China as origin). Okay, no. Taking that back right away. Don’t want to speak too soon.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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