I’m currently reading The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure by Dan Werb as part of my local library’s Summer Reading Program, and in the third chapter there’s the story of how Dr. Ralph Baric got into studying coronaviruses back in the early 1980′s, long before the virus family became known as a danger to humans with the SARS epidemic in the early 2000′s and longer still before the COVID pandemic. He became interested in this viral family because, by RNA virus standards, they’re enormous: bigger than any that should exist based on our knowledge of RNA viruses at the time. How very queer, right?
I would love for SARS-CoV-2 to be eradicated from the world as smallpox and rinderpest were. I would love to never even encounter its basically harmless cousins that only cause common colds again. I shiver at the fact that the pandemic is not yet over, from compassion and fear for my fellow humans and from fear for myself.
And yet, it struck me, once again, how even terrors like pathogenic coronaviruses are still, at some level or another, beautiful and marvelous pieces of our intricate biosphere. Infectious diseases have been a long-term special interest of mine, since on one level disease and poison are one of those things that terrify me the most, the thought of something being Wrong within you that you cannot see but you can feel the pain of, and on another level preferring informed terror over uninformed any day.
So, Coronaviridae... I may hate what the most famous among you is doing, but you are, after all, only a family of viruses. Giants of the RNA virus world, you are equal parts fascinating and terrifying.
