In order to truly understand an object, event, or phenomenon, one must to be able to mentally represent it in all of its dimensions. The more connections that a concept has to others, the more one knows about it. In the case of Covid-19, this means not only being able to define it as a virus, but also to establish its cause, results, possible agents, etc. It should not be conceptualized as a selfie, but rather as a Cecil B. DeMille movie with a cast of thousands.
For this reason, people all over the world are so interested in discovering the past, present, and future of the coronavirus. This includes where it came from and what caused it to exist. It is part of the mental journey that must be taken in order to understand the virus better and to come to terms with it. This quest has led many to put on their thinking caps in an effort to find someone or something to blame for the pandemic.
Perhaps for this reason, this morning in the grocery line social club, the conversation focused once again on the coronavirus. Lately, it seems to be the only thing that anyone ever talks about. The daily statistics in Spain were once again somewhat worse than those for the previous days, and so everyone was a little depressed.
Since last week I had predicted that the numbers of new cases (and deaths) would begin to rise, my friends in the grocery line now look on me as a kind of soothsayer. In all fairness, it was an easy prediction to make. When people return to work, there are more possible contexts for infection.
President Sánchez has publicly stated that there is still no date in sight when the country will return to normal (if indeed that ever occurs). He mentioned the vague possibility of a ‘new normal’ in late May, but no one has much faith in that either. According to a recent study in Australia, Spain has had the worst Covid-19 response of the 32 countries surveyed (the USA was 22nd on the list). Nobody in the grocery store line disagreed with the results. Conversation then turned to how we had gotten to this point and what was the origin of this disaster. Everyone had a different opinion.
A man, who is an unemployed waiter, said that he was not sure, but he believed that the pandemic had been predicted by Nostradamus as well as by the calendar of the ancient Mayas. His daughter had also told him that the coronavirus and its effects had been foreseen in 2008 by a psychic in America. In a gloomy voice, he thought that we were doomed because the pandemic was an Act of God and nothing could have been done to avoid it.
A lady, who works at the dry cleaners, disagreed and said that this was part of a huge master plan. She mysteriously took out her new cell phone and said that she planned on returning it. She had heard that 5G networks caused Covid-19 by weakening the immune system. Out of curiosity, I asked her how she knew this. She said that she had seen it on her son’s computer. Her mobile phone was dangerous, and thus had to be quickly disposed of. She darkly advised all of us to stay away from 5G towers. Fortunately, Granada does not as yet have one of these death machines.
The lady next to her said that she did not know about her mobile phone, but she now had a deep distrust of her wide-screen television because the Covid-19 pandemic had coincided with the release of a new series on Netflix that was very similar to what was currently happening. She had a vague feeling that these two events were connected in some significant way. Since she was the only one subscribed to Netflix, it was impossible for anyone else to weigh in on her opinion.
Other people took a more local view of the issue, and said that the virus had come from Madrid. Granada would have been in better shape if it had closed its borders in March to prevent Madrid residents from coming to the ski station in Granada when all of this had first begun. Fortunately, I was spared giving my opinion because the grocery line moved on, and we were allowed into the store.
When I returned from shopping, my primitive neighbor, Neanderthal Man, had his door open. Out of curiosity, I asked him where he and Mrs. Neanderthal thought the virus had come from. He said that it had arrived from space in a meteorite that had landed in China and somehow exploded. Apparently, the virus was inside the meteorite.
Thinking that this would be a promising plot for a science fiction movie, I asked him whether the meteorite had been sent by malevolent extraterrestrials. He admitted that he did not know, but he was sure that the NASA was investigating this possibility. In any case, he and his wife were protected against the coronavirus because they had had their flu and pneumonia shots. I wished them good health (and good luck).
My neighborhood is evidently a hotbed of coronavirus conspiracy theories, which blame inanimate objects, meteorites, and divine beings for the onset of the coronavirus. However, oddly enough, no one mentioned bioengineering, which seems to be the main theory used by various nations to hurl accusations at each other.
Most of this mud-slinging has been between the USA and China. The United States has made repeated accusations that the virus came from China, and was manufactured as a biological weapon at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. An alternate though related theory is that since impeachment did not work, the Democratic Party conspired with the Chinese government to use the coronavirus to get rid of President Trump.
In whichever version, this theory is one of the most popular. According to a national survey, roughly one third of all Americans believe that the virus was created as a result of bioengineering.
The malicious design and creation of Covid-19 is a belief also entertained by the Chinese, who say that the virus was bioengineered in the USA. They claim that the outbreak actually started in America and was exported to China. It spread there because 300 athletes from the US military, who in October attended the 7th Military World Games in Wuhan, were previously infected with the virus.
Not surprisingly, Iran has also latched onto the idea that America is responsible for the pandemic and says that the coronavirus is part of an American plot to damage Iran’s culture and honor. In this same line, the Arab world accuses the USA of deliberately creating the virus to sell vaccines.
According to India, Covid-19 is a bioweapon that went rogue and has spiraled out of control, though they are a bit fuzzy on which nation is responsible for accidentally unleashing the virus.
The theory that the coronavirus was bioengineered is attractive because it allows people to blame their current misery on a human or a group of humans, who can thus be punished and made to suffer for their wrongdoing. It would be somewhat more difficult to demand retribution from a 5-G tower, a wide-screen television, or a natural process such as evolution.
No one wants to accept the fact that the bioengineering hypothesis is simply not true. According to findings recently published in Nature Medicine, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is the product of natural evolution.
The (boring) truth seems to be that the virus jumped into a human host from an animal, while going through a re-assortment of its genetic make-up that allowed it to acquire the properties to start a pandemic. Even so, the exact animal source will only be confirmed after many years of research. Since the jury is still out on the source of the SARS outbreak in 2003, the results will not be in tomorrow.
Real (not fake) science takes time.
