If COVID-19 frightens you, you should be terrified by climate change [in-Depth, Opinion]
Physician Assistant Cori Kostick demonstrates the Brigham B-PROTECTED testing booth used to administer tests for COVID-19 at the Brigham and Women's Hospital community testing site in Boston May 5. (CNS/Reuters/Brian Snyder)
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Some people are talking about an eventual return to "normal" life once a vaccine is developed or herd immunity achieved. But the experts caution us to not be so Pollyannaish. Others talk about an ongoing version of the current state of affairs -- masks in public, social distancing, restricted travel -- as indicative of a "new normal."
But that also fails to take into consideration the fact that we have not reached a new equilibrium. We are not even close. There is nothing "normal" (new or otherwise) about what we are experiencing during this pandemic because, as Wallace-Wells writes [in his 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth], "The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again." Things are bound to get much, much worse, and there are no indications that we can ever return to the historical place from which we came.
Wallace-Wells dedicates a chapter in The Uninhabitable Earth to "Plagues of Warming," in which he outlines the frightening likelihood that what we have witnessed with COVID-19 is merely a foretaste of "existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by [global] warming." He gives several examples of how climate change will only exacerbate future pandemics.
As the planet continues to warm, tropical climate regions will expand and reach new places heretofore unaccustomed to such heat and humidity. Along with the climate shift will come vectors like mosquitos and ticks that transmit diseases such as yellow fever, dengue, malaria and Lyme disease. As Wallace-Wells recounts, each year new outbreaks of these and other illnesses are recorded in locations where they have been previously unseen.
Additionally, these infectious diseases will continue to mutate, wreaking havoc on larger and larger populations in new and, at times, entirely unpredictable ways. Think back to 2016 and the Zika outbreak. Wallace-Wells notes that few people in the so-called global north worried about this disease (or had even heard of it) just a few years ago. He writes: "One reason you hadn't heard about Zika until recently is that it had been trapped in Uganda and Southeast Asia; another is that it did not, until recently, appear to cause birth defects." It seems that this disease mutated in its journey to the Americas, and its consequences became dire in new and frightening ways.
A health worker fumigates for mosquitoes as part of preventive measures against the Zika virus at a cemetery Feb. 1, 2016, near Lima, Peru. (CNS/Reuters/Mariana Bazo)
In the wake of this pandemic, there is understandably a lot of concern about harmful bacteria and viruses like SARS–CoV–2, which causes COVID-19. But what about the billions of "good bacteria" upon which we depend in order to live and perform basic bodily functions like digestion? As Wallace-Wells points out, "More than 99 percent of even those bacteria inside human bodies are presently unknown to science, which means we are operating in near-total ignorance about the effects climate change might have on the bugs in, for instance, our guts."
If you are not concerned about the possibility of climate change directly affecting the trillions of bacteria already living inside you, potentially turning them into mortal enemies instead of necessary friends, take some time to learn about what happened to saiga antelopes in 2015, in which most of the global population died off suddenly from a bacterial infection. If there's anything this virus pandemic should teach us, it is a reminder that we are creatures too, susceptible to all the same things every other organism on this planet is.
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