I'm sure you are thinking "Oh great, here comes another person with her entitled, uneducated opinions!" Don't worry, you guys. It's not going to be that kind of a post.
Research soothes my soul. Google gives me comfort. I know that the answers to my questions or queries lie on the internet in some form. It might take me a lot of digging to find what I am looking for and I might have to wade through a lot of opinionated drivel, but I will still end up finding an answer.
It has been no different with COVID-19. I immediately started reading articles and studies about past pandemics and virus outbreaks. I would only read ones that were from before all of this happened so that I could get some good info from actual scientists and not journalists from some random website trying to get clicks. In the beginning, most of my Googling focused on how governments and societies have handled past pandemics and epidemics, along with ways they've succeeded and ways they've failed. Recently, my attention has turned towards studying viruses, in general. How they work, what they are (biologically), how they become eradicated, why some are more deadly than others.
This post is really about things I've learned from all of these hours of research and the conclusions I came to at the end. I hope you can get something from it like I did.....these are literally the questions I asked myself and I've cited the sources I used at the bottom of the blog post.
1. What is a virus? Is it a living organism?
Even though it's an organism that grows and mutates, it's not considered "living." However, it does require being inside of a living cell to replicate. When it's outside a cell, it exists in the form of a protein 'shell' with strands of DNA. So, while it's not inside the house of a "living organism party," it's outside looking in, almost being a guest, if that makes sense. No one knows where they started or how.
. 2 How does a virus work?
Viruses are smart, smart, smart, yet surprisingly simple. When they infect a host cell, the cell is forced to replicate the virus strand thousands of times. This eventually kills the host cell and can potentially cause damage to the host. Once inside the host cell, it can mutate very quickly by combining with the DNA of the host cell and can also combine with other bacteria's DNA. Viruses can infect any living thing on earth. Viruses can be spread from humans to humans, animals to animals, animals to humans, and humans to animals. There is a cycle the virus follows: adsorption, penetration, replication, and release. In most cases, our bodies can fight these viruses the first time we are infected and our immune systems do what they are supposed to do. If our bodies get infected again, our amazing immune systems, which have learned from the first time around, fight it better the second and third time.
3. Do we ever get "immunity" from a virus?
Because viruses mutate all the time, no, we don't ever get complete immunity to viruses. That's why we get a flu shot every year, but it's not the same one each time. It's also why you could have had a flu shot but still get the flu because the vaccines we get each year are scientists' best estimates of the types of flu we might get. But despite our best efforts (which are still commendable and still help keep virus numbers down, at least somewhat) viruses are still smarter than we are. Some viruses are very habitual in how they work, such as chickenpox. You get one set of symptoms of infection once, but the virus remains in your system, only it becomes dormant. It may or may not release again in a person's lifetime, and if it does release again, it's in the form of shingles with different symptoms. That's why now, even though it's the same virus, there is both a chickenpox vaccine and a shingles vaccine. The virus may mutate again, for all we know, this is just what we know about it right now.
4. When were viruses discovered and how many are there?
Viruses have always been around, but it's only been recently we've had a name for what they were. The very first discovery of a virus was the tobacco mosaic virus, found in a plant. The first human discovery and identification of a virus was yellow fever in 1901. We now discover 3 to 4 viruses per year. The assumption is that there are 320,000 viruses that infect mammals on earth, but that's never going to be an exact number because there are too many living things on the planet that change constantly - science could never keep up. It's also the assumption that the viruses "discovered" each year aren't necessarily new, they are just ones that have been newly identified but could have already been present. These viruses are called "novel."
5. Does that mean I probably have a virus in my body right now?
No, you don't have A virus. You probably have 380 trillion of them, and the collection of the ones you have in your body are called "viromes." As human beings evolve, we carry all of these with us, and inside of us all at this very moment, trillions of viruses are fighting to find trillions of bacteria cells to infect, and the bacteria cells are fighting off the viruses and our body's immune system is fighting them both. There are viruses inside every part of our body, all the time, and we are sharing them with each other, all the time.
At this point, my research led me to this first conclusion: I no longer question why COVID is so contagious or deadly, I'm astonished that we are still living as a species after thousands of years, now knowing how viruses are trying to kill us off literally 24 hours a day. But, so is the bacteria, that if infected with the virus, will eventually die too. So, bacteria and viruses can actually help work against each other to keep us healthy. (Crazy, huh)
6. Why are some viruses deadlier (called "virulent") than others?
The answer, however, unfortunate, is that we don't really know, but we have educated guesses pulled from researching the current and past viruses. The thing that makes viruses so hard to understand is that while they share similar attributes with each other (like, the Spanish Flu, for example) they work differently in every human being and change every year, based on a variety of reasons. Recently, they were able to exhume a body from a person who died of the Spanish Flu in 1918. The thing that made this particular strand unique, besides the higher-than-average death rate, was the age of hosts that the strand killed. Most flu strands kill the elderly and those with compromised immune systems; the Spanish Flu killed children and healthy people in their 20's to 40's. That's not to say they are the only age groups who died, but it's unusual for flu strands to kill that many in an age group of people considered healthy. They found out that the Spanish Flu actually mixed with two other viruses to form a new strand (when that happens quickly it's called an "antigenic shift") Some researchers believe people were infected with one strand between 1900-1915 but the virus shifted in 1918 to a strand that no one had immunity to. What made this virus even more virulent was the fact that it was in the middle of World War I. Not only did people have no flu vaccines at that time, but many doctors and physicians were overseas in the war, and many of the healthcare workers who were here, contracted the virus themselves and were unable to care for the sick. They also didn't know how to treat it back then; at one point, they believed they could use aspirin to treat it, which resulted in aspirin poisoning in many patients who were not administering it properly. They think aspirin poisoning was responsible for many of the deaths of Spanish Flu in October of that year.
(Not to get off on a tangent of the Spanish Flu, LOL)
How virulent a strand turns out not only depend on each person's immune system and the individual strand itself within an individual human being, but also external factors that include: access to healthcare (not overwhelming medical facilities beyond their ability to treat infected persons); access to reliable information from scientists and medical professionals that allows each person in a society to make informed and wise decisions; the ability of the scientific community to identify the virus and test those in each area for infection to see how the virus functions and learn how best to treat it; hygiene and sanitation practices in a given community; the cooperation in which a person in each region participates in helping to slow the spread of the virus; the geographic and demographic details of each community (proximity of living spaces between one person to another, etc).
7. How do the pandemics of viruses end?
Well, while the symptoms of a specific virus come to an end, the virus never stops infecting people. Everyone eventually becomes exposed to the virus, either through contact or vaccines; pandemics end because either we develop immunity or we die. That's the sad, hard, cold truth about viruses. The other sad, hard, cold truth about viruses is that you can't outrun them, you can't isolate from them, and you can't outsmart them. You can deter certain ones from spreading for a period of time, you can develop vaccines to help keep the spread at bay, you can improve your immune system to fight them off more effectively, you can treat the symptoms that are causing you distress to the best of your ability and you can study them to find out the best way to treat them.
But there's no foolproof way to keep yourself from being infected by viruses. They are already in all of us, from the moment of our existence, and will remain in us, until we die. Viruses are way too smart, way too adaptable, and way too determined to survive. Many viruses cycle themselves into a common respiratory virus - one that will become part of the annual respiratory illnesses and death rates that occur each year and in some cases, part of the annual flu vaccines we take. In Texas, in 2015 (the last time the Texas Department of Health and Human Services did a report) there were 10,000 deaths attributed to viruses affecting the respiratory system. COVID-19 will eventually become a part of those annual deaths, one that we become familiar with and adapt to each year, and probably one that we get vaccinated for each year. While it might be a serious threat right at this moment in time, history tells us that it will not be like that forever.
As an example of this, you can look at the flu virus pandemics in the 20th Century...
H1N1: 2009 Pandemic (60 million cases, 274,304 hospitalizations, 12,469 deaths that year in the US) - it's responsible for 75,000 since 2009) *H1N1 is a descendent of the Spanish Flu in 1918, and our flu vaccines currently contain strands of the H1N1 strand.
H3N2: 1968 Pandemic- total worldwide deaths, 1 million, 100,000 in the US (still circulates as the seasonal flu)
H2N2: 1957-1958 Pandemic - total worldwide deaths, 1.1 million, 116,000 in the US (estimated)
8. How are countries supposed to handle it?
Countless studies have been done about how a country can control, or plan for, a pandemic and these influence how a country will react in the midst of a pandemic....and these are the outcomes of those studies, very simply: a) no one country or territory can handle a virus outbreak the same way as another because there are too many factors of each geographic area that change the severity of the outbreak for each region; b) there are always viruses that are warned may threaten a large number of people each year based on assumptions of research and data collected that allow scientists to come to a conclusion that may or may not happen, so even though there might be fear of a large outbreak, it doesn't mean it will happen. Governments are constantly having to make split-second decisions about whether or not a virus will be virulent enough to take action in a large-scale manner, 3) there will always be societal obstacles to overcome when governments intervene in keeping viruses contained - and no matter how you personally feel about health being the most important factor, there will always be a portion of the population who does not agree, (you should read some of these studies about arguments for liberties and freedoms- they go back a long way and they are fascinating. I'm always fascinated by how dependable the human race is to being human), 4) governments won't always know they've made the wrong decision until, well, they've made the wrong decision. Hindsight being 20/20. you can look back on choices made during pandemics that turned out to be wrong ones and decisions that were made that turned out to be right ones, even if they just happened to work out by accident - every time this happens, it's our job to learn from what we did right and what we did wrong, and do better next time; 5) pandemic action plans are incredibly important - but are also incredibly expensive and require ongoing change and adaptation and must be done in times of health, as well as in the midst of a pandemic. This is historically not the time people think to make pandemic action plans. Part of planning for a pandemic is giving funds to scientists and researchers who are constantly overseeing trends in viruses and who are constantly reporting that information to people in charge. Another part of planning is preparing people for what to expect and educating them with good, reliable information. However, the only way to know if a country's plan will work - is to go through a pandemic. Since the US started planning for influenza outbreaks in 2005, we've only had one pandemic during that time. It was H1N1, a strand that is still circulating as a seasonal flu virus and causing deaths today (though certainly not at the levels during the pandemic.)
Deaths in a pandemic are a certainty. No matter how much people try to avoid deaths, they are certain to happen. The goal of a country's plan isn't to prevent them completely, because that would be impossible, but to lessen the mortality impact of the outbreak. Testing is an essential part of controlling the mortality rate, as it allows healthcare systems to know the trends of the virus and allows them to plan for it. While it might seem in the midst of a pandemic that people in the government aren't handling things well or that people in our sphere of influence are being irresponsible with their actions, the spread of the virus and testing for it is actually an essential part of the plan in a pandemic. Spreading the virus in a somewhat controlled way allows for those infected (remember - we said infection amongst all citizens is a certainty) to receive the right medical treatment at the right time. "Flattening the curve" so to speak, is actually the best way to prepare for, and handle, a pandemic when a vaccine does not exist. Keep in mind - that doesn't mean the goal is to stop the curve, entirely - again that's an impossibility. It means to slow the steepness of the rate at which the disease spreads from person to person, to allow for testing to be done, which creates demographic information essential to each phase of handling the pandemic. "Targeted risk assessments" come from this data, meaning that testing allows for a more targeted "risk" of future actions. The important word there is RISK - with a virus pandemic you don't know if something will work unless you try it. I know that's a hard pill to swallow, but it's the truth. That doesn't mean you just roll the dice with no information; it means a government must assess their risk based on the testing information they receive, and make the best decisions they can given the information.
We are still in our infancy of understanding viruses....even in the 10 year period of time between 2009 and now, our understanding of virus pandemics increased exponentially. But at the end of the day, we don't know what we still don't know, so all information and decisions are based on the knowledge we have right now., When historians and scientists look back on this event with perfect hindsight, we can see what mistakes were made because of knowledge we didn't have yet.
If anyone would like to read the most recent update to the US Pandemic Influenza Plan (2017), you can access the PDF document here. The government didn't have an influenza plan until 2005 - not enough was known about them until that time.
Bottom line: The CDC says "These plans aimed to stop, slow or otherwise limit the spread of a pandemic to the United States; limiting domestic spread, mitigating disease, suffering and death; and sustaining the infrastructure and lessening the effects on the economy and society as a whole." (CDC: National Pandemic Influenza Plans) That means the eye of the government is on ALL parts of the country that suffer in a pandemic - not just whether or not a virus spreads.
At the end of the day, I came to these conclusions about what I can do in a pandemic.
COVID-19 is a serious and real threat to public health, just as previous pandemics of viruses were also a serious and real threat to public health....pandemic history teaches me that viruses are real and they can be deadly, even with medical intervention and treatment.
I can't be upset with other people for what a virus will or will not do. Our actions do not necessarily dictate how a virus decides to act, though there are things we can do (or refrain from doing) in the hopes of slowing the spread for others. I can do my part to engage in behaviors that don't unnecessarily put other people at risk. I can accept that if I do contract the virus, and I was doing everything in my power to prevent it, it is because a virus's job is to spread and that it has spread to me. It's not mine or anyone else's fault that biology works in that way and it is not mine or anyone else's fault that we are in a pandemic.
Living in the world as a human being means that I have to accept that viruses are an ever-present and very real risk, and I have to be responsible for my own health to help my body fight off illness, while also realizing that illnesses will most definitely occur. I also need to be responsible for my actions while living in a society and not engage in behaviors that knowingly and purposefully put others in risky situations, to the best of my ability.
I can deal with my fears and anxieties over the virus in a productive and emotionally healthy way. I can make the situation around me better and easier for others by handling my fears and anger over the illness in a way that isn't destructive and difficult for those around me. That means accepting that pandemics are real and serious, while also accepting that there are productive ways I can deal with it. I can be vigilant while also accepting the inevitable; I can be responsible while also remaining calm. I can simultaneously take the pandemic and its' consequences seriously, while also accepting that there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening entirely.
If I appear to take this virus seriously, I can accept that not everyone will appear to take the pandemic as seriously as I do. If I appear laid back about the pandemic, I can accept that not everyone will appear as laid about the pandemic as I do. I can understand that all of us are different and handle emotions in a different way - but it doesn't mean that a person who handles their emotional responses of this pandemic differently than me is wrong or to blame - nor does it mean their emotional response will lead them to act in ways that are risky to others. Everyone, regardless of what they say, is experiencing some level of fear, stress, anxiety, and frustration, it's just not the same as mine.
Source Articles:
Comments