I knew about coronavirus only because of vaccinating my dogs back in the day. It often struck with parvovirus, another danger for dogs, and together they could be fatal in the early days. I knew people who lost entire litters. Soon after they appeared (in the 1970s), both canine coronavirus and parvo were added to the vaccinations I administered to my puppies. 

That was a long time ago. Today we are looking at something else, a coronavirus that is believed to have jumped from snakes to human beings, a transfer likely made possible because of the wild animal meat trade in China. It has happened before. Swine flu came from swine, chicken pox from chickens . . . Ebola may have come from primates. The HIV passed from chimps to humans in the 1920s. Transmission to world awareness took longer for HIV because transmission between humans requires exchange of body fluids.

Human coronaviruses spread more easily “from an infected person to others through

• the air by coughing and sneezing
• close personal contact, such as touching or shaking hands
• touching an object or surface with the virus on it, then touching your mouth, nose, or eyes before washing your hands
• rarely, fecal contamination” [from the CDC]

It is like the so-called “common cold” but seriously fatal. Scientists all over the world are working together to swiftly find an effective response:

“The pace is unmatched,” said Karla Satchell, a professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “This is really new. Lots of people [in science] still try to hide what they’re doing, don’t want to talk about what they’re doing, and everybody out there is like: This is the case where we don’t worry about egos, we don’t worry about who’s first, we just care about solving the problem. The information flow has been really fast.”

Companies are most concerned with their bottom line. Some scientists are worried about reputation and income, but this current crisis seems to prove that the bottom line for scientists is knowledge.

“A scientific assessment of the spread of the disease, assuming an optimistic 90 percent quarantine, still predicted more than 59,000 infections and 1,500 deaths — twice the toll of the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak.” from The Washington Post

The last devastating world pandemic of a hundred years ago killed between fifty million and one hundred million people. The so-called “Spanish flu” was definitely not from Spain but perhaps Kansas. The worldwide movement of troops during WW1 spread the disease. As many as one person in twenty living on Earth died.

Measles was carried slowly around the world by European explorers, whalers, and traders. Entire island populations died of the disease. Measles.  influenza, pneumonic plagues, and smallpox devastated the Native Americans. They had no immunity because there were no native diseases in this hemisphere. Native peoples were also deliberately infected by whites. As many as 90% of the preColumbian population died of imported disease.

Today we have quick air travel that serves to move more than people. Diseases (and other unwanted weeds and vermin) are dispersed throughout the world quicker than ever.

Contagion begins before symptoms appear, so that people may not know they are sick until after they have exposed others to illness. No one understands this more clearly than the scientists rushing to discover answers.