If I were the virus and I had a brain, which is a great anthropomorphism but necessary for the story, I would not be a bother to you. My only goal would be to spread my RNA and replicate. You as my host are important to me. I know that as a eucaryote, you have 1/
2/ a lot of options about which virus to replicate though not a lot of choice in the matter. It's in my best interest to get in, replicate, and get you to pass me on to someone else. That's hard to do when you're dead, so I don't want to kill you. But it's also hard
3/ to do when you keep all your bodily fluids to yourself. So I need to cause a little runny nose, some sneezing, some coughing, that kind of thing. In fact when I jump from some other species to yours for the first time, I'm not very good at it. I was good at bats or
4/ something, and humans are a different breed. But when I jumped species I was lucky enough to find you and be ready enough for you to get you to replicate and pass me on. When you replicated me you made billions of copies of me, and, being a single stranded, RNA
5/ virus, I mutate very quickly. So, some of those copies may be a little more symptom producing and some a little less. Those that are more symptom producing get transferred a little easier and because they are, they find more hosts and replicate more. So as I move
6/ from human to human, I seem to get better at infecting humans with each passage. At least I get better and better until I get so good that I make you sick enough to look like people should stay away from you. When I get that good, you stop being able to get me
to new hosts, and then it's the copies that are a little less good that get passed the most. Now, you guys live a long time, and it takes you a long time to reproduce. I get that. Very inefficient; you should talk to someone about that. Anyway, I'm much faster. I can
get into your cells and make copies in minutes. So I can be a happy deer virus or snake virus and jump to humans and, through passage, become more virulent to you within a matter of weeks. While you're still trying to figure out what happened, I'm starting an epidemic
that you can't get your head around. I'm the shit, if I do say so myself. Anyway, now that you know more about me, the question is, what are you going to do about it? Will you realize that me and my relatives are doing this 24/7 and have been for millions of years?
Will you accept as a fact of life that every so often we are going to ignite a potential pandemic? Will you start to surveil us like you do yourselves? Did you know you could? For not much money at all you could measure the background of viruses in your community and
watch which of us starts to pick our head up. You could get data on which of us is gaining traction before the 10th person is hospitalized. You could then rapidly sequence the sample and see where it came from. You guys have really learned a lot about us over the
last few years, and it's given you a chance to survive. It may seem stupid of me to say all this, but really, it doesn't matter. If you guys can protect yourselves, we're still okay. We'll just jump from a pig to a chicken rather than to humans. All the same to us. Anyway,
good luck with whatever you decide to do. Keep your economies hyper-efficient with just in time delivery if you want and pay the price every 10 to 20 years. Keep not watching out for us and kill off a lot of people every 80 to 100 years. Like I said, it really doesn't
matter to me. If I was the virus, that is.
Sorry I lost count after 7 and stopped tagging the number
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