03/11/2020
This now-notorious coronavirus was once an inconspicuous creature, lurking quietly in its natural host: some population of animals, possibly bats, in the caves and remnant forests of southern China. The existence of such a living hide-out — also known as a reservoir host — is logically necessary when any new virus appears suddenly as a human infection.
Why? Because everything comes from somewhere, and viruses come from cellular creatures, such as animals, plants or fungi. (A viral particle isn’t a cell; it’s just a strip of genomic instructions enclosed in a protein capsule — a message in a bottle.) A virus can only replicate itself, function as though it were alive and abide over time if it inhabits the cells of a more complex creature, like a sort of genetic parasite.
The virus persists at a low profile, without causing trouble, without proliferating explosively, and in return it gets long-term security. Its horizons are modest: relatively small population, limited geographical scope.
But this guest-host arrangement is not imperturbably stable, or the end of the story. If another sort of creature comes in close contact with the host — by preying on it, by capturing it or maybe only by sharing the same cave — the virus might be jostled from its comfort zone and into a new situation: a new potential host.
Suddenly it’s like a gaggle of rats that jump ashore from a ship onto a remote island. The virus might thrive in this new habitat, or it might fail and die out. If it happens to thrive, if by chance it finds the new situation hospitable, then it might establish itself not just in the first new individual but in the new population.
It might discover itself capable of entering some of the new host’s cells, replicating abundantly and getting itself transmitted from that individual to others. That jump is called host-switching or, by a slightly more vivid term, spillover. If the spillover results in disease among a dozen or two dozen people, you have an outbreak. If it spreads countrywide, an epidemic. If it spreads worldwide, a pandemic.
Imagine again that gaggle of rats on a previously rat-free island. To their delight, they find the island inhabited by several endemic species of birds, naïve and trusting, accustomed to laying their eggs on the ground. The rats eat those eggs. Soon the island has lost its terns and its rails and its dotterels, but it has an abundance of rats.
Over time, the rats also acquire the ability to dig lizards out of their hiding places amid rocks and logs, and eat them. They develop an improved agility at tree climbing, and eat eggs from birds’ nests up there, too. Now you might as well call the place Rat Island...
If the remote island of habitat is a human being newly colonized by a virus from a nonhuman animal, we call that virus a zoonosis. The resulting infection is a zoonotic disease. More than 60 percent of human infectious diseases, including Covid-19, fall into this category of zoonoses that have succeeded. Some zoonotic diseases are caused by bacteria (such as the bacillus responsible for bubonic plague) or other kinds of pathogen, but most are viral.
Viruses have no malice against us. They have no purposes, no schemes. They follow the same simple natural imperatives as do rats or any other creature driven by a genome: to extend themselves as much as possible in abundance, in geographical space and in time. Their primal instinct is to do just what God commanded to his newly created humans in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it.”
For an obscure virus, abiding within its reservoir host — a bat or a monkey in some remote region of Asia or Africa, or maybe a mouse in the American Southwest — spilling over into humans offers the opportunity to comply. Not every successful virus will “subdue” the planet, but some go a fair way toward subduing at least humans.
This is how the AIDS pandemic happened. A chimpanzee virus now known as SIVcpz passed from a single chimp into a single human, possibly by blood contact during mortal combat, and took hold in the human. Molecular evidence developed by two teams of scientists, one led by Dr. Beatrice H. Hahn, the other by Michael Worobey, tells us that this most likely happened more than a century ago, in the southeastern corner of Cameroon, in Central Africa, and that the virus took decades to attain proficiency at human-to-human transmission.
By 1960 that virus had traveled downriver to big cities such as Léopoldville (now Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo); then it spread to the Americas and burst into notice in the early 1980s. Now we call it “H.I.V.-1 group M”: It’s the pandemic strain, accounting for most of the 71 million known human infections to date.
Chimpanzees were a species in decline, alas, because of habitat loss and killing by humans; humans were a species in ascendance. The SIVcpz virus reversed its own future prospects by getting into us and adapting well to the new host. It jumped from a sinking lifeboat onto a luxury cruise ship.
SARS-CoV-2 has done likewise, though its success has occurred much more quickly. It has now infected more than 30 million people, just under half as many as the number of people infected by H.I.V., and in 10 months rather than 10 decades. It’s not the most successful human-infecting virus on the planet — that distinction lies elsewhere, possibly with the Epstein-Barr virus, a very transmissible species of herpesvirus, which may reside within at least 90 percent of all humans, causing syndromes in some and lying latent in most. But SARS-CoV-2 is off to a roaring start.
Coronaviruses are an exceptionally dangerous group. The journal Cell recently published a paper on pandemic diseases and how Covid-19 has come upon us, by a scientist named Dr. David M. Morens and one co-author. Dr. Morens, a prolific author and keen commentator, serves as senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci. His co-author on this paper is Dr. Fauci.
The paper says, among other things, that coronaviruses harbored in various mammalian species “may essentially be preadapted to human infectivity.” Not just bats but other mammals — pangolins, palm civets, cats, ferrets, mink, who knows what — contain cells that are susceptible to the same viral hooks that allow coronaviruses to catch hold of some human cells. Existing within those reservoir hosts may prepare the viruses nicely for infecting us.
The closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 is a virus discovered seven years ago, in a bat captured at a mine shaft in Yunnan Province, China, by a team under the leadership of Dr. Zhengli Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This virus carries the moniker RaTG13. It is about 96 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2, but that four percentage point difference represents decades of divergence, possibly in a different population of bats. In other words, RaTG13 and our nemesis bug are not the same virus; they are like cousins who have lived all their adult lives in separate towns.
What happened, during those decades of divergence, to bring a still-undiscovered bat coronavirus to the brink of spillover into humans and enable it to become SARS-CoV-2? We don’t yet know. Scientists in China will keep looking for that closer-match virus. The evidence gathered so far is mixed and incomplete, complicated by the fact that coronaviruses are capable of a nifty trick: recombination.
That means that when two strains of coronavirus infect the same individual animal, they may swap sections and emerge as a composite, possibly (by sheer chance) encompassing the most aggressive, adaptive sections of the two. SARS-CoV-2 may be such a composite, built by happenstance and natural selection from components known to exist among other viruses in the wild, and emerging from its nonhuman host with a fearsome capacity to grab, enter and replicate within certain human cells.
Bad luck for us. But things are not rigged to please Homo sapiens.
SARS-CoV-2 has made a great career move, spilling over from its reservoir host into humans. It already has achieved two of the three imperatives: expanding its abundance and extending its geographical range. Only the third imperative remains as a challenge: to perpetuate itself in time.
Will we ever be rid of it entirely, now that it’s a human virus? Probably not. Will we ever get past the travails of this Covid-19 emergency? Yes.
Dr. Morens has recently been a co-author of another paperexamining how coronaviruses have come at us. In it, he and his colleagues nod to the eminent molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize laureate in 1958, at age 33, who later wrote: “The future of humanity and microbes likely will unfold as episodes of a suspense thriller that could be titled ‘Our Wits Versus Their Genes.’ ”
Dr. Morens is on target, and Dr. Lederberg was right. Viruses can evolve, quickly and efficiently. But humans can also exhibit intelligence—sometimes...
