Did you know that Coronavirus multiplies inside your body at the rate of 10,000 per hour?
Which means that once a single coronavirus gets inside your body cell, it can make 10,000 copies of itself in an hour. Within a few days of getting infected, you’d have millions of viruses inside a single drop of blood. Imagine the total number of viruses that would be inside a single person!
Yet, it is so sneaky that it shows no symptoms in most infected people and it can spread to thousands of people even before they know it.
Scientists have not been able to find a cure yet, but they have discovered why it is so hard to detect, and even much harder to kill.
Coronavirus spreads first, and starts killing later
Like every other virus, Coronavirus isn’t even alive. It is just a small piece of genetic code covered by a shell of protein, and it is as small as 1/1000th of your eyelash.
Viruses have been around for billions of years, long before the existence of any other living organisms that we know of. And they have perfected the skill of surviving even without being alive.
Coronavirus works in a cunningly evil way – when it enters a human body, it makes lodging into your nose, throat, and the airway. From where it can spread to others even before the host human shows any signs of infection.
This is how the virus can spread to thousands of people even before any of them know that they’re infected and they’re infecting others – since there no symptoms of first 12 to 15 days.
So there’s no way of detecting it and stopping it because it spreads first and starts killing later.
We have had 6 such viral pandemics in the last 100 years
Coronavirus is very similar to the most lethal virus pandemics of the last century – Flu outbreaks of 1918, 1957, and 1968. And then there were SARS, MERS, and Ebola. All these viruses are called “zoonotic” since they came into humans from wild animals.
Coronavirus can survive on metal and plastic for 3 days
They cannot move or reproduce when they are outside any host, and the Coronavirus has a 24-hour survival duration on cardboard while it can last for 3 days on steel and plastic. Which means that Coronavirus has been surviving till now by constantly infecting the animal population such as bats and Pangolins.
In fact, it was the exotic meat consumption of Pangolin which brought the virus into humans. According to Jeffery Taubenberger, virologist with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:
I think nature has been telling us over the course of 20 years that, ‘Hey, coronaviruses that start out in bats can cause pandemics in humans, and we have to think of them as being like influenza, as long term threats.’
How Coronavirus starts breaking the human body
When the coronavirus enters your system, it uses the proteins and energy from your body to produce copies of itself.
And that is when the immune system gets triggered and releases the defensive chemicals, white blood cells travel towards the virus to attack it – and body temperature rises, causing fever.
Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University, said:
Viruses are like destructive burglars: They break into your home, eat your food and use your furniture and have 10,000 babies.
Why an anti-viral cure will never work against Coronavirus
The dangerous think about an anti-viral cure is that whatever medicine harms the virus will harm us as well – since the virus has now become a part of our biological machinery – according to the virologist Karla Kirkegaard.
Anti-bacterial medicines work against thousands of kinds of bacteria, but you’d need a unique medicine for every different kind of virus.
And even that is not enough since the virus keeps mutating and evolving, and scientists need to discover a new cure for the same virus every time it evolves. This is precisely the reason why we don’t have a cure for HIV yet.
What is your best defense against Coronavirus, according to the scientists
Good news is that Coronavirus might not be evolving very fast, and that gives the scientists enough time to find a cure and put an end to it.
But again, as the virologist Kirkegaard said:
The best weapons we have against the coronavirus are public health measures, such as testing and social distancing, and our own immune systems.
In a few years, Coronavirus will become mild like the common cold virus
Other scientists believe that Coronavirus will get milder with time, and will eventually turn into just a common sickness that causes normal cold and fever.
The virus doesn’t really want to kill us. It’s good for them, good for their population, if you’re walking around being perfectly healthy.
If the host dies then the virus dies too, since it cannot spread and multiply anymore. This is why the successful evolution of Coronavirus will take it into a milder direction – where it is highly contagious, but less lethal. And that’s how it will spread and survive for a long time.
For example, the virus for oral herpes has been inside the human species and our ancestors for 6 million years!
SARS and Ebola virus died out, but Coronavirus will not die
The reason SARS and Ebola viruses died out because they killed their hosts with a high mortality rate and then they were not able to spread themselves.
The ultimate goal of viruses is to be contagious while also gentle on its host — a less destructive burglar and more of a considerate house guest.
So the common opinion among scientists is that the coronavirus will eventually become very similar to common cold viruses. And perhaps we will have a cure then.
Featured Image Courtesy:
Comment here