Black Summer at The North Pole

You probably haven’t noticed, but Siberia is melting. A place universally considered a barren frozen wasteland has been experience massive summer heatwaves for the better part of a decade. The permafrost, permanently frozen ground that has remained frozen fro millennia, has begun to rapidly melt, collapsing into vast sinkholes, and releases massive bursts of methane and fire into the atmosphere. This has led to political instability and massive economic toll. However, a smaller, but equally dangerous threat lurks in this ravaged ecosystem.

In the Yomalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (a state in The Russia Confederation,) a cache of recently-thawed reindeer carcasses contaminated with ancient, preserved anthrax bacteria infected several herds of nomadic reindeer with the deadly bacterium. This resulted in the death of over 2000 caribou, and the infection further spread into the surrounding region, hospitalizing 100 people and killing a 12 year old child. This was in 2016 and the world has gotten much warmer since then. There are untold uncharacterized pathogenic microbes swelling within massive tracks of frozen ground and glacial lakes across the globe, and each one of these is a potential reservoir for new and deadly diseases. Or in this case, old and deadly diseases.

Balmy temperatures increase the habitable range of a myriad of viral and bacterial vectors, including the mosquito that carries both West Nile as well as Dengue. In addition, warmer temperatures are often beneficial to the replication of the virus itself, with higher temperatures often accelerating the rate replication, transmission and mutation. Global warming induced habitat destruction is pushing humans closer than ever to large pools of animals known to be viral and bacterial host species, such as bats and rabbits. The recent zoonotic outbreaks of both Zika as well as Covid-19 indicate that more diseases are likely to follow suit. With no end to increasing temperatures, it is critical that researchers continue to monitor the spread of novel, or ancient, infectious diseases and that their reports be made public and free to access.

Lady ‘rona and the Purple Death

Covid-19 is a virus(currently THE virus). The common cold is a virus. The flu (or influenza if you’re fancy) also a virus. Polio? Virus. HiV? Virus. So is West Nile, Zika, the measles and herpes. Of this rogues’ gallery of potential villains, Coronavirus is most similar to the common cold, spreads like the measles, lives in animals like West Nile and doesn’t mutate much, like herpes. Yet Covid-19 is most commonly compared to the flu, and these comparison are dangerous (and frankly insulting to viruses themselves, who have spent quite a lot of time perfecting their craft, thank you very much). Analogies are powerful, and directly influence how we approach problems, so lets see how this analogy stacks up:

The Spread

Both Covid-19 and the flu are primarily respiratory illnesses, (although Covid-19 is know to be far less choosy in the organs it infects) so they spread though coughing sneezing, talking, singing and even breathing. However, Covid-19 is much more infectious; if you have it, symptoms or no, you are far more likely to spread it to other people. Epidemiologists measure how easily a disease spreads with something known as an R0 value. An R0 value of 1 means you are likely to infect 1 other person before getting better. Larger R0 values therefore indicate higher infectivity. The flu has an R0 value of about 2, depending on the strain and time of year. Covid-19 has an R0 value of about 6, making it much more infectious and therefore dangerous. The best way to change a viruses R0 is simple: wear a mask!

The Dead

Covid-19 is far, far more lethal than the flu, and for many reasons. For one, it is a new virus, never before encountered, and we have no hereditary acquired immune response to it. The flu, however, has been around for much, much longer. Covi-19 infects far more tissues than the flu. Influenza is almost exclusively a respiratory disease, while Covid-19 is capable of infecting the heart, kidneys, lungs, brain and other organs. This leads to a much larger and more sever set of symptoms for Covid-19 compared to the flu. All this results in a lethality of over 10 times higher, with a much larger percentage of hospitalizations and long-term health effects.

The Method

While they share some basic similarities, such as the fact that they use RNA as their genome, physically, these two viruses are very different from one another. The Covid-19 genome is a single huge molecule and contains 20+ gene products, while the flu has EIGHT separate genomes and far fewer genes. The Covid-19 genome is so large because it codes for special proteins to ensure that it this long molecule does not slowly build up genomic errors over time. Similar genes are found in humans and prevent deleterious mutations that can cause cancer. In comparison, the flu mutates very fast, patially due to the above 8 genomes, which it can shuffle like a deck of cards, producing new genome combinations every generation. These large difference in biochemical traits indicate that treatments and clinical responses top the two diseases must be different, and healthcare administrators and doctors must be aware of the ever updating library of knowledge about the virus.

The Rest

Like everything, context is key. There is very little misinformation in regards to the flu. There are no flu conspiracies, nor is there a FluAnon. But Covid-19 misinformation abounds, and has dramatically affected the spread and treatment of the virus, with even simple things like masks become profoundly political and biased. False cures and treatments are appearing everywhere, and even large pharmaceutical companies have been found to be engaging in suspicious ethical practices; Astra Zeneca is seeking waivers to protect them from any unknown side effects from any Covid-19 vaccine they produce, which is unheard in annual flu vaccines.

These two viruses, and the diseases they produce could not be any more different. The flu is simply a disease many of us encounter on a regular basis that we have used as a truly poor analogue for something we don’t understand. It is understandable in these uncertain times that we seek comfort in the familiar, but I think we can do better than the flu.