Here’s Dr. Klotman’s weekly COVID update from Baylor College of Medicine (my medical Alma Mater). This is Week 157 of the smoldering COVID Apocalypse, and the light of the Sun seems to have, at last, pierced the clouds. Are we smarter or wiser because of it? Some are, I am sure; others perhaps less so. Dr. Klotman’s update is upbeat; all of us could us some upbeat after so many months of sadness and worry.
Cases continue to fall; deaths do as well. Hell, even the wastewater seems to have declining COVID viral loads at 80% of the sampled sites! Yeah, that means that 20% are still hot; that’s how these things go. My cynical yet optimistic heart says that things are improving, nonetheless.
To a biology watcher/nerd like me, the most interesting item from Dr. Klotman’s update is the report that Chinese Racoon Dogs are now implicated as an intermediary species in the rise of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The racoon dog is, unsurprisingly, neither a racoon nor a dog. It is a most closely related to foxes. This species was being sold, illegally, in the Wuhan wet market as food. This small, foxlike mammal is easily infected with the virus. You will recall that domestic cats, dogs, mink, white-tailed deer, big cats (lions and tigers, oh my!) as well as many other species (bats and pangolins) can harbor this particularly troublesome coronavirus.
Well, it seems that even the clans of Olaf and Ragnar (Norwegian grey rats that infest our sewers) can be infected with the COVID virus. In the past, I have written about Olaf and Ragnar and their kin (my made-up Viking names for rats that have invaded our home here in Austin in past years). I would not rush to blame the rats for COVID, I think it far more likely that we humans have infected them.
No matter. I think that the last embers of the COVID Apocalypse are being snuffed out – partly by vaccines, partly by the natural immunity conferred by infection among younger folks, partly by the millions of lost lives during the course of the pandemic.
I may have said it before, but in my mind, I can hear the echoes of Morgan Freeman’s voice at the end of the Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds (2005). Paraphrased, “In the end, the aliens were defeated by the tinniest of creatures that God, in his wisdom, had placed on the Earth, and to which man, through the sacrifice of millions of lives over the centuries, had become immune.”
If you have lost a parent or relative or friend during this global tragedy, we who have survived, grieve with you.