Strange weather in Alabama lately. By ‘lately’, I mean since December. January and February, bless their hearts, could barely string two days together that weren’t gloomy with cold rain. March was as warm as May, and sometimes June. And bursts of April have been colder than January.
Today (Sunday, April 19) repeats last Sunday’s reaping of the whirlwind. Except today the rain and severe weather got started early, before dawn. Last week as much was in the forecast, but nothing happened until late Sunday evening.
Weather patterns often seem to hold to a seven-day cycle, like our week, though seven days hasn’t always been a week’s duration in history. Ancient Rome used an eight-day week; ancient China, ten. And France as late as the revolution used a ten-day week (perhaps to show, like our government does with daylight savings time, that the new government was so powerful it could control time). Pre-history, in our hunter/gatherer days, we likely had no weeks, but marked time according to seasons—to the amount of daylight in the temperate zones and rainfall in the tropics. Like so many cultural developments, seven-day weeks seemed to arise partly through convergent evolution, partly through diffusion. All were a product of the new economy of sedentary agriculture. Like agriculture itself, the seven-day week probably arose in the fertile crescent. Its practice was first conclusively documented by the ancient Hebrews.
Seven days seems arbitrary but isn’t. Seven days is born of the natural cadence of the solar year’s 365 ¼ days and the lunar month’s 29 ½. A bit more than 52 weeks in a year, a bit more than 4 weeks in a cycle of the moon. Like pi won’t ever yield a definitive number relating a circle’s diameter to its circumference, there’s no magic number for dividing and parceling and reconciling the lunar and solar year. Seven days is as close as any. A rhythmic cadence of time. Six days to toil and one to rest, a not-quite-arbitrary cycle that was necessary with the advent of sedentary agriculture to break up the monotonous, featureless days. A seventh day to remind one why suffering through the previous six was worthwhile. The week as a tool for carving the square peg of hunter/gatherer genes to fit the round hole of sedentary agriculture.
It’s hard to say how long this weather cycle might last. For weeks during January and February, it would rain every Monday-Friday and clear up for one or two of the weekend days. Spring weather patterns are generally shorter-lived than those of summer and winter. This may be the first and last of this one.
About the time God gave coronavirus to Alabama, He graciously broke the winter rain cycle. The sun finally came out just as everyone came home, crowding my days. I needed to not be stuck inside with the family, and God provided. Improvements on the two properties—a house in Mountain Brook and the farm on Lookout Mountain—resumed. It’s been a busy couple of months. I’ll gladly take one day of stormy weather for six days of sunny and not-quite-yet-miserable warmth. Thank-you, God.
It’s claimed there’s over two million cases of coronavirus in the world right now. I bet it’s a hundred times that many; maybe even a thousand. There’s no way this virus is so prolifically spreading without which a great many more people have it than are showing up in the statistics. New York City, the hardest hit city in the world by far, probably has better than half its citizens with an infection.
I think we’ll eventually discover that the reason so many of the infections are mild or asymptomatic is because the virus, while readily transmissible, only causes severe symptoms and deaths when a heavy dose is received in an exposure (or any dose is received in an immune-compromised individual, either for age or other health reasons). Being exposed to a low viral load gives the immune system time to set its defenses and keep the virus at bay, turning it into a benign part of the ordinary fauna of human beings, like, e.g., the Epstein-Barr virus is a part of the fauna of probably better than 90% of people but only rarely causes problems (e.g., mononucleosis and post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder). A study of Santa Clara County in California that tested the blood of 3,300 volunteers for corona antibodies showed that infection totals there might be understated by anywhere from 35 to 80 times the amount of known infections. I bet it’s even more than that.
I came down with something earlier this week. The first time I felt a bit out of sorts was after dinner Friday a week ago. I put it down to maybe having developed a mild shellfish allergy (we had shrimp for dinner that night). I felt flush and hot for no apparent reason. I checked but had no elevated temperature. The next day I felt mainly fine, until later that afternoon, when I felt mildly achy and somewhat fatigued, with a dry cough and runny nose. Over the next couple of days I felt the same sort of thing, except twice a day—once mid-morning and later mid-afternoon. By Tuesday I was up at the farm working on some inside paneling for the pole barn and the spell came on hard about 2:00 in the afternoon. I felt weak and ravenously hungry, though I’d had my normal breakfast and lunch and wasn’t working extraordinarily hard. I ate some pasta salad I’d stolen from home and laid down and felt better after an hour or so.
The symptoms seemed, save a bit more debilitating, just what I experienced the countless times in the past when I’d gotten a cold, which may have been what it was. Or, maybe coronavirus. Colds are caused by the same type of viruses as corona, so maybe a mild case of it would feel like a cold. Whatever it was, the prescription for me with a cold is to feed, not starve it. And one of the best ways I’ve found to feed it is beer—the alcohol provides both a ready supply of energy and an analgesic for the symptoms. I drank five that night, way more than usual, because each one felt a little better than the one before, which is not normally the case past about three. I also ate way more than usual. Between the beer and chili and pasta salad and chips and hot dog I had from about five in the evening until finally drifting off to sleep around midnight, I must’ve put away a couple thousand calories.
The next day (Wednesday) I felt much better upon waking but the achy, fatigued feeling with a scratchy throat and mild cough came back around mid-morning again. I decided I needed something other than beer to feed the virus, whatever type it was, so ran down to the store (wearing a mask) and bought some cokes, milk and cereal. By Thursday when I left the farm to head home, I’d had three one-liter bottles of coke and several servings of Special K and whole milk, and felt much better. No mid-morning or mid-afternoon spells since. I still have a dry cough and runny, stuffy nose, but other than that, I’m good. Through all those cokes and otherwise empty calories, I didn’t gain a pound.
Was it the coronavirus? Who knows? It could have been a garden-variety cold. It also could have been seasonal allergies that got a bit carried away—a couple of weeks earlier, I’d taken myself off Flonase and an antihistamine that I normally take during the spring because I didn’t want my immune response dampened by drugs in case I got exposed to the virus. I guess I’ll only ever know it wasn’t the virus if I get the virus.
I started back on my favorite stomach acid reducer—Zantac—on Wednesday, because it seemed something wasn’t right with my stomach. Seasonal allergies affect my stomach. Yes, it seems weird, but they do. As Zantac has been taken off the market for having been discovered to have minute traces of a cancerous substance (NDMA) in it, my supply is limited and dwindling. But I figured that if what I had was the coronavirus, using Zantac to help fight it was worth a few of my precious remaining tablets. It seemed to help. Along with the cokes, i.e., the ready sugar and plentiful fluids, it seemed a knock-out punch.
Bacteria are capable of a neat little trick that makes them nearly qualify as multicellular when they exist in numbers. They can ‘quorum sense’ through chemical signaling, discerning how many of their mates are close by. Once they sense there’s enough of their number close by, they turn on genes that promote finding a new host.
Now the incredible part: viruses that infect bacteria (phages) can listen in on the bacterial signaling to determine whether enough of them (the bacteria) are around to warrant their own breakout to seek more hosts.
Thus, a bacteria is so finely attuned to its environment that it knows when its kind have proliferated to the point it’s time to find another host, but the parasitical virus inhabiting them, which technically isn’t even alive, is also so finely attuned to its environment that it spies on its host’s communication with others of its kind to determine whether the time is ripe for it to burst out of its host and find another.
It doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine that viruses infecting cells in a human body have something like the sensing mechanism of bacterial phages, excepting perhaps that the information they’d seek is knowing the activity of the immune system–of whether it is ready to kill and dispose of the cells the virus has infected—or of its host cells and the defenses they present. We know the Epstein-Barr virus and the cells it infects (B-cells of the immune system) dance a little jig, testing each other’s strength. I bet we’ll eventually find something like quorum sensing in coronavirus, which might go a long way in explaining the disparity of severity in illness among similar cohorts.
Whatever sort of quorum sensing there is, the simple mathematics of infection mean that all other things equal, viral load at exposure should impact the severity of illness. A lighter viral load should cause milder symptoms; a heavier load, harsher symptoms. This is due to the nature of the body’s immune response. Once the body senses the presence of a new viral pathogen, it takes time for it to configure, through self-selected modifications to the DNA of T-cells (the principal virus-fighting cells), a T-cell that is specifically designed to eradicate the new virus. Our T-cells have been modifying their own DNA since long before we knew anything about CRISPR. T-cells modify their DNA by a process that’s only a little better than random, trial and erroring to the configuration that works best, and then proliferates the winner. This takes time, all while the virus is racing to infect as many cells as it can. If the virus gets the head start of a heavy viral load or a weakened immune response, the virus often ‘wins’ in the sense that the immune system loses the battle and the host dies.
Viruses always lose, however, when they kill their hosts. They can’t propagate in a dead host. Viruses don’t want to kill us. They just want to make us sick enough that they can find their way out to find another host (through sneezing, coughing and breathing with the coronavirus—through diarrhea with bacteria-induced typhoid fever and cholera). It only seems they seek our death. Those 150,000+ dead of the coronavirus represent an inexpertly evolved virus, inflicting massive and needless self-debilitating damage. Viruses are just selfish little snippets of genetic code, like our own selfish little snippets of code that we call genes. Which is to say, viruses are just like us, gene vessels tasked to be fundamentally concerned with nothing else but their survival and propagation. As they depend on us for survival and propagation, killing us is not a good strategy. It’s why the very deadly viruses like Ebola are also very unsuccessful at pandemic spread.
The whole coronavirus crisis has a sense of finality to it. Like nothing ever afterward will be the same.
Maybe I’m projecting. Up at the farm, I had already decided that if what I had there turned out to be coronavirus, I’d just ride it out, dying or surviving alone and away from the people I love who I might otherwise infect. And the prospect of death felt grim. Partly for the irony of dying of a disease spread by social contact while I’m about as social as a bear in the wood. But mostly I think for how utterly pointless this virus has revealed the whole of the exceptional American project to have been. We’re so exceptional we’ve let a puny virus not much deadlier than a bad flu season destroy our whole way of life. My sense of the American quorum made me sad.