We must continue to work to optimize preventive (such as vaccines) and therapeutic strategies. This can help turn the experience into an ally against this and other viruses
Over the past two years Sars CoV-2 has reached every corner of the globe, infected over 300 million people and killed more than 5 million. Everyone is wondering how this was possible, when this pandemic will end and what to expect in the future. We do not have certain answers but we have numbers to think about and the awareness that it will take years of research and investments to really know the virus and its interaction with humans. Today we know that there are 1.6 million viruses of mammals and birds that could cause zoonosis, that is to say jump of species like Sars-Cov-2 did and 200 others before it. We know little or nothing about 99.9 percent of these viruses. But one thing is certain: the more the human being grows and expands, occupying natural spaces and ecosystems, the more he is exposed to viruses that otherwise (perhaps) he would never have encountered. On Earth we are 7.8 billion, while only 80 years ago we were just over 2 billion and uninhabited areas were 66 percent of the land (now they are just over 30 percent). Therefore, it will be more and more frequent to come into contact with those animals that we know are necessary for the survival and evolution of some viruses, such as bats, which can reach 5,000 specimens in 1 square meter. Little wonder, therefore, if these animals are reservoirs of zoonoses. The numbers also help us understand the complexity of the Sars-Cov-2 virus and the deployment of the forces of researchers and doctors from around the world to defeat it. It takes Sars-Cov-2 for ten hours to replicate in a cell, and 100 billion are the cells in which the virus replicates during an individual’s infection. In each of us, 100 million are the mutations that Sars-Cov-2 can develop and we reach 10 billion if an immunocompromised individual: most of the mutations are useless or harmful for the virus, very few instead allow the emergence of variants. On the other hand, today there are over 9 billion doses of anti-Sars-Cov-2 vaccines administered in the world (of which only 3 percent arrived in Africa, where 1.2 billion difficult-to-vaccinate people live) and 300 antivirals in development, pills that can be stored at room temperature, safe and effective against all present and future variants, which could change the scenario if they also arrived in less developed countries. A question mark remains as to the likelihood that SARS-Cov-2 will wane over time and add to the list of human coronaviruses that cause mild flu-like syndromes each year. To date, we do not know if and when this will happen. For this reason, we must continue to work to optimize preventive (such as vaccines) and therapeutic (such as antivirals) strategies, helping society to understand how, on a global level, it can be a valid ally against this or future pandemics. One last number, always nice to remember (at least for a virologist): 100 trillion are the good viruses that each of us hosts in the body without which we could not live. Numbers, numbers, numbers. They never lie and always help to reason.
January 27, 2022 (change January 27, 2022 | 11:12)
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