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Things will get worse

Perkunas

Things will get worse, there is no magic fix for any of this. There is no last minute “cavalry charge” coming to save the day. All we can do is to turn fully face the storm that is coming and accept that it is coming. Many of you don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to hear this either, but this is where we are and this is our reality. The next 60 days and especially the next 21 will be brutal, brutal in a way that I fear the American public are not prepared for. For most people there has been a slow and dawning realization that things were going bad, but for most this seemed like some far off “over the horizon disaster” that wouldn’t touch us or our homes. The American public, sealed in their bubble of safety and ignorant bliss, didn’t want to believe that such a moment was coming. The moment has arrived and we can cast blame on many places, but there are only two areas where our blame and our coming anger should be focused on; China and ourselves……..how did we get here? In part 1 of a 3 part series, I will lay out what the virus is, how it spreads, and a timeline of how China dropped the ball on this situation.

When this finally ends and the world begins to rebuild from the pain, death and economic loss that we will all feel in one way or another, we will look back and wonder what happened. Our feelings of sadness will turn to anger, and that anger should be initially focused on China. China is ultimately responsible for the initial spread of this virus, there is no other way to look at it. However, before we examine the role of China is causing this catastrophe, we need to address why COVID-19 is as deadly as it is. There are two factors that make COVID-19 uniquely suited to causing so much trouble for humans; the way it is spread and what it does to the human body.

COVID-19 spreads at a rate that is higher than many other pathogens out there. The way that disease spread is calculated is called the R “naught” value. Every single disease out there has a different R naught value, some are very high, some are low, but this value is important to understand. The higher the R naught value, the faster and more exponential the spread. What the R naught value measures is how many additional healthy people does each infected person expose to the pathogen. In viruses like the seasonal flu, the R naught value is 1.3. That means that each person with the seasonal flu infects 1.3 people. A mathematical principle would look like this 1 healthy person infects 1.3 people, 1.3 people would infect an additional 1.3 people, meaning that 1.7 people would then be infected, and they in turn would infect 1.3 people each, scaling up the entire time. A 1.3 R naught value is not great, but COVID-19 has a much, much higher R naught value. The value varies, but one study from Europe shows us that the value is as low as 3.1 up to as high as 6.5. That means that each person could possibly infect 6.5 additional people, which would be catastrophic if true. If the R naught value for COVID-19 is even as low as 3, it means that the virus is 3 times more contagious than the seasonal flu, possibly six times as contagious, but the problem doesn’t stop there.

The COVID-19 virus is called a Novel Corona Virus, because it is novel “or new” to the human race, meaning that we have never encountered this particular pathogen before. This unique organism didn’t even come into existence until November 2019. That matters because as a novel corona virus, it means the human race and our amazing immune systems have never encountered this organism at any point in human history. That means that our immune systems have no built in defense against it and when it is encountered in our bodies, our immune systems are unfamiliar with it and respond with a massive strike on the virus. This “war within our bodies” eventually goes nuclear with all parts of our immune system responding to the virus in a “scorched earth” type of battle. The casualties in white blood cells, dead virus and other cells from this war can lead to significant tissue damage (especially in the lungs), serious complications and the death toll we are seeing. There are historical examples of this type of pathogen killing tens of millions of people throughout history. The deaths of millions of Native Americans from smallpox, measles and other viruses and bacteria were the result of novel pathogens encountering populations that had never been exposed to them before. Fortunately, it appears our fatality rate will be nowhere near what happened to Native Americans in the 16th-18th centuries, but it reflects how deadly novel pathogens can be.

Now that we have reviewed how the virus spreads and briefly discussed what it does to the human body, we should probably talk about the role China has played in this pandemic. The virus came into existence sometime in mid-November 2019, we know this because there are methods to trace the virus’s age by analyzing the genome of the virus. We have also determined that the original species the COVID-19 virus inhabited was most likely a species of bat. Viruses in most cases exist in only one species at a time, to “colonize” a new species a virus needs to do two things; mutate and find a vector, or transmission route into the new host species. In the case of COVID-19 the genetic pathway of mutations remains unclear, we may never know when or where the virus that became COVID-19 jumped out of bats into another species. However, we do know what the other species was, it was most likely Pangolins, a scaly anteater type of animal found in Africa and more importantly South East-Asia.  DNA and protein sequences isolated from pangolin tissue was analyzed by researchers in several locations around the world. The researchers identified protein sequences in sick Pangolins lungs that were 91% identical to the virus proteins found in humans infected with COVID-19. Other species could also be part of this mutation chain, but we now know that bats and pangolins are involved in the mutation of COVID-19.

Knowing the mutation chain is important, but so is understanding the vector method into human beings. In many parts of China, there exists a type of market called a “wet market”, such markets are known for selling live animals such as cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, bats and many other types of wild animals for consumption. Wet markets are named after the melting ice used to preserve the food, as well as the constant washing of the market floors when they are covered in blood from the animals. The markets are unsanitary and are often locations where outbreaks of disease occur. Currently the most likely hypothesis we have is that someone working in the market came into contact with a butchered pangolin and somehow ingested the precursor virus to COVID-19, which in turn mutated inside the body of the first human that was exposed to it, turning into the COVID-19 virus. With a new outbreak of disease, we start to look for a “patient zero”, the first person likely infected with the pathogen in question. With COVID-19, we think we know who the patient zero is. This is important because it tells us that the virus most likely came into existence in Mid-November, and that gives us an opportunity to back track the spread of the virus. Finally, knowing who and where patient zero is from, allows us to take a look at the reality of COVID-19 versus the lies the Chinese government told the world for weeks and weeks.

The outbreak of this disease began in China in December 2019 in the city of Wuhan, in Hubei province which is in south Central China. The first week of December saw the emergence of the so called patient zero, with additional individuals admitted to Wuhan hospitals in the first 21 days of December. With several people showing similar, yet unique symptoms, the doctors in Wuhan had to know they were dealing with something new. Looking back at reports from China, the timeline of COVID-19 spread for December and January looks like this:

DECEMBER 2019

January 2020

The government of China had close to sixty days to tell the world what was happening in their country. Instead, they engaged in a propaganda campaign designed to confuse the world about what was happening. The cost of this deception is already extremely high and will continue as the virus continues to spread. When this is all said and done, there must be a reckoning with China. The US and the world must take concrete steps to both punish China and work to bring back certain segments of our manufacturing and pharmaceutical bases. We must take these steps to ensure that the next time this happens, and there will be a next time, we are able to take care of our citizens without having to rely on a despotic regime that is in all intents and purposes our enemy. Part II will focus on how Europe and the United States fail to prepare adequately for COVID-19 and how unserious our responses were.

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