Just One Big Tribe

© Darius A. Irani, 2020

Covid-19 is like any other living creature. It has the same compelling need to find a suitable environment to live in, and to perpetuate itself. Had it picked any other species for its host, it would have lived and died like dozens of its cousins we never hear of. For millennia, these viruses have kept a tight rein on the populations of the many species that inhabit our planet. If it wasn't for them, we would be scrambling to survive on a planet overrun with trillions of insects. 

For any virus to stay in a single host is a death sentence. Either the host’s immune system will kill it, or it will kill the host and itself in the process. To live it must continuously jump to a new host. Within a host it will replicate itself and cough and sneeze itself onto any surface that is nearby, hoping for a new host to pick it up. In the wild, there are spatial boundaries that limit how far a virus can spread. A pox that destroys an ant colony may not be able to jump to an adjacent colony and will die out. Ebola will decimate an entire tribe of monkeys and then, because of the territorial separation between the tribes, will be forced to go dormant because a new host is not within its reach. 

Between overpopulation and modern transportation, no such boundaries exists among humans.  Having shown up in Hawaii-a group of islands in the middle of nowhere-no one is safe. To it we are ALL just one big continuous tribe.

On the plus side, humans are the only species that has learnt how to stop a virus without losing a whole tribe. With the help of vaccines we stopped Polio, Measles and Smallpox. But it only worked because the whole tribe participated. In its final years, whenever a case of Smallpox was detected, a team of health workers would descend on the location, form a cordon around the patient and vaccinate everyone at the periphery. They would then steadily move towards the center, vaccinating as they went, giving the virus no way to break out of this wall of resistance. The only requirement was that everyone within the cordoned off area had to get the vaccine. Even a single exclusion was an escape route out of the tightening noose and the team would have to start all over again somewhere else. 

Covid-19 has no vaccine, so we can’t build a wall of resistant hosts. Instead, we will have to defend ourselves by countering the two ways it will try to spread-proximity and easy access to the respiratory system via the nose, eyes, and mouth. But just like with earlier viruses, for it to work everyone must participate. A single indifferent or careless individual can, within hours, create a pathway to an exponentially large set of new hosts.  

Covid-19 is often described as being unprecedented. It is hardly so. It is just the latest in a long line of pandemics, nature’s mass killers. The earliest on record dates back to 430 BCE. A possible typhoid outbreak that killed half the population of Athens. The most fatal one was the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century. It is estimated to have taken about 200 Million lives in the span of just four years. In 1918 a world population exhausted by the killing fields of WWI was ravaged a second time by an influenza pandemic. It killed over 600,000 Americans and about 50 Million world wide. This is twice the number of casualties attributed to the war itself!

These killers all have a few things in common. They are all living entities created by nature. They recognize no political boundaries, have no regard for our differences, bow to no rank or title and are determined in their goal to infect us all-the ultimate reminder that we are all just one tribe, all equally fair game.

In the last century our tribe has come a long way in understanding these killers and how to stop them. If Covid-19 thrives it will not be because we did not know how to contain it, but rather because we would not work together in the best interest of our tribe.