The Great Pause Week 20: Coronation Part I
By: Albert Bates
Tags: Pandemic Diaries, Covid 19, Collapse, Lynn Shelton, China

Life is change

How it differs from the rocks.

I’ve seen their ways too often for my liking;

New worlds to gain.

My life is to survive

And be alive

For you.

You are the crown of creation

And you’ve got no place to go.

— Jefferson Airplane, 1970.

This week a young friend wrote to ask what’s the big deal about the virus. “More people die of other things,” she said. Gosh, I thought, maybe I should stop the presses on my latest book, Plagued, due out in October. After all, this pandemic is no big deal.

In the Maya Mountain foothills in early March, closing out a Belizean permaculture course and having meetings of experts about our plans for a Cool Lab microenterprise hub, I stayed up nights scouring the internet for then available science on the novel coronavirus. Based on that research, I put on mask and gloves, observed personal distancing while traveling, and quarantined myself for two weeks when I reached this island in Mexico, where I have been weathering the pandemic these past 20 weeks. I completed the Dark Side of the Ocean galley proofs and began work on a new book, specifically addressing what I was then learning — how best to have a decent life during a pandemic.

My research on Plagued gave me both a deeper understanding of this particular coronavirus and also better insight into the strange nature of the global response to it. In this multi-part essay, I will try to dissect some of those discoveries.

So how deadly is SARS-CoV-2? We still don’t know, but the more we are learning, the deadlier it appears. It is never a good idea to anthropomorphize a non-living snippet of nucleotides in a spiky protein shell, with no ability to eat, breathe, grow on its own, or make choices, but come on, this little guy really lends itself to the embodiment of some kind of malevolent monster.

Let’s review some of the new findings. We’ve known since January that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 disease is transmitted by tiny liquid droplets containing virus particles — a protein capsid enclosing a virion of serpentine, single-stranded RNA. These droplets, which may contain thousands of such virus particles, typically derive from the exhalations of infected people, but they might also come from toilet flushes, sweat, tears, blood, or any bodily excretions that can be aerosolized.

The finer the droplets, the longer they can linger in the air, and enclosed spaces like restaurants, public toilets, and elevators quickly become kill zones. Fomites, the droplets that land on surfaces, can also be picked up and ingested or absorbed, so it is good preventive practice to wash hands, launder masks, disinfect tables, chairs, phones and handles, and leave a UV-C light on when you are out (exposure to 250–270 nm UV-C light kills CoV-2 but also destroys endogenous microbial flora and can cause skin cancer).

Studies are showing now CoV can spread from people to animals and from dogs and cats (particularly cats) to other animals and potentially back to people. It does not (yet) infect farm animals including pigs, chickens, ducks, horses, sheep, and cattle. For dogs and cats, the primary symptoms are gastrointestinal rather than respiratory. The American Veterinary Medical Association and the CDC recommend that sick pets should be kept in quarantine, just as you would with people. If you are sick with Covid, or your pet is, avoid petting, snuggling, being kissed or licked, and sharing food. If you must come in contact with a sick pet, mask and wash your hands. They will likely recover, but in the meantime, they could be superspreaders (although no pet-to-human transmission has yet been confirmed). They should leave the home only on a leash or in a carrier.

Salunke, et al. The SARS-CoV-2 Virion and its Proteins

CoV-2 droplets infect by being inhaled or swallowed, where they attach to the linings of the respiratory system or the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, and following along those routes, the virus attaches itself to healthy cells (its spiky protrusions act like a key to unlock ACE2 receptors), cracks the cell nucleus, and rapidly reproduces itself by inserting its RNA virion into the cell’s DNA code. As cells die, they clog the lungs and other organs with necrotic tissue and fluids, leading, in the lungs, to Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), as evidenced by low blood oxygen levels, difficulty breathing, and pneumonia-like cough, chest pain, and fever.

Induced inability to breathe is what makes waterboarding such an ineffective and sadistic torture. People will say or do anything to get it to stop. CoV-2 is a virus that has learned to waterboard.

By April, doctors around the world well understood that Covid was not just a lung disease. Many of the infected had lost their senses of taste and smell; in others, toes or fingers darkened as if bruised; hearts swelled; blood clotted; immune systems attacked organs they were meant to be saving. But because lessons were learned too late, doctors had been killing some of the patients they were trying to save. The virus employed some treatments used against it to strengthen its attack, like aikido. Intubate and turn up the airflow and viroids went deeper into the lungs. Flush fluids from the body in order to prevent lungs from filling and the virus crashes the kidneys.

The only surprise was that we were surprised. I write much of that off to Sinophobia, something both US political parties are comfortable superspreading. Nobody wanted to listen to Chinese doctors on the front line and many excellent early research findings were completely ignored until they had been replicated in the West months later: nasal swabs; putting patients on their bellies; administering remdesivir and anticoagulants; shutting down whole cities; mandatory masking.

Initially, WHO, CDC, and others said not to wear masks. The WHO made two mistakes. First, they didn’t realize scaling: if the probability of infection is p, if both people wear masks it becomes p squared. For example, if p=0.50, both people wearing a mask would lower p to 0.25. Second mistake: if I reduce the viral load by half, I don’t decrease probability of infection by half — I may decrease it by 99%. That’s because the probability of infection is nonlinear — it’s an S-curve. In addition, they lied because they were worried about a mask shortage. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mortality rates from the first quarter of 2020 left epidemiologists scratching their heads about how deadly CoV-2 is. The Case Fatality Rate was nearly 14 percent in Italy, but only 0.5 percent in Iceland. Germany and Spain were 4.5 percent, and South Korea half that. The United States mortality rate is currently 6 percent, but because testing is so poor, it could be lower. Or, because hospitalization requires insurance, which is tied to employment, it could be higher. The global average now is 6.8 percent, with a median of 4.2.

Lethality depends on a whole host of factors that vary from country to country, city to city, and person to person. We can see by comparing total deaths in a given city over the past several years that the first half of 2020 made a sharp mortality-by-all-causes spike, geographically mirroring local outbreaks. Total anomalous deaths are well above confirmed Covid deaths, leading to a suspicion that most Covid deaths go unreported. Extrapolating from those numbers, 150,000 deaths in the US could actually be 1.5 to 3 million. Epidemiologists have predicted one million US Covid deaths eventually. One million could have been surpassed last month.

In January, Chinese scientists mapped Covid’s attack route into vascular endothelial cells through the Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme #2. ACE2 is found as a coating on cells in the upper respiratory tract and lungs, as well as on the heart, kidneys, and intestines. When a CoV-2 virus particle hacks a cell’s genome, it instructs the host to sprout sticky filopedia that extend out into the bloodstream like flypaper, glomming more virus particles passing by in the blood. CoV-2 devastates its target by concentrating firepower.