Living through a pandemic - some thoughts

After the first entry introduced some basic notions on how viruses work and emerge, I want to start talking in this entry about where we were, collectively, in March 2020. I am sure that, when times goes by, we will all remember what we were doing when the COVID-19 hit us, in the same way that most of us remember what we were doing on September 11 2001 (in my case, I was doing some examinations for a job). Collectively, as mankind, we were in a very fragile situation, like the pandemic showed us. I focus here on taking things for granted, leaving for a future post the issue of the shift in values in society and public health and education. Taking things for granted In the evolution of our society over the last decades, we collectively developed a thinking where many things were taken for granted, making us less aware of the effort necessary to keep them working and moving us towards the fulfilling of our own personal needs exclusively. We got used to having our consumption needs ...

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a virus as follows: [1] any of a large group of submicroscopic infectious agents that are usually regarded as nonliving extremely complex molecules, that typically contain a protein coat surrounding an RNA or DNA core of genetic material but no semipermeable membrane, that are capable of growth and multiplication only in living cells, and that cause various important diseases in humans, animals, and plants. The definition is in itself complex, starting with the fact there is no consensus as to whether a virus is a living being or not. The structure of a virus is quite simple: a protein surrounding a core with genetic material. Full stop. But even that simple configuration is able to cause important harm to other living beings. Since January 2020, the whole world is upside down thanks to one of these viruses, a coronavirus known as COVID-19. In a series of entries in this blog, I will discuss, quoting Weezer, how “the world has turned and lef...