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Bats in the time of Covid-19 Paolo Agnelli Just four years ago, the Word of the Year in the monumental Oxford English Dictionary was “post-truth”, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ”. This means that, while the scientific community promotes conduct and strategies based on evidence, modern society may have arrived at a new model in which what counts is not veracity but social signalling and attention (McCarthy et al., 2020). This often translates into the dissemination of speculative or misleading information, which is then reinterpreted as if it were true. Today, while the SARS-CoV-2 emergency continues to devastate human health and national economies, the media are still searching desperately for the most unusual, unsettling and extraordinary news concerning this pandemic. In this crazed search, the available scientific information is clumsily reworked in a deceptive way purely to provoke a reaction and give free rein to people’s imagination. To cite one example: last summer, medical research evaluated that, on average, COVID-19 was lethal in around 1% of the cases of contagion, being particularly dangerous for the elderly, whereas the common flu virus had a 0.1% chance of being lethal – i.e. ten times lower. Nevertheless, a well-known online newspaper featured the following headline: “Coronavirus is ten times more lethal than flu”. It did so, however, without adding the essential complementary information, which is that, without the periodic flu shot, the seriousness of influenza would be similar to that of coronavirus! Clearly, in cases such as this, the purpose is not to offer the public a more understandable message, but to attract readers, clock up more contacts on the web and sell this visibility for advertising purposes. In practice, the interpretation of complex research conducted by a qualified and articulate scientific community ends up being dependent on the limited medical competence of a journalist. And then there is the sudden high profile of many so-called “experts” who all too often, when placed in the limelight, give opinions on matters outwith their specific field of expertise. As such, even complex questions of ecology and zoology get “simplified”, and this is why the fact that “bats are a natural reservoir of Coronavirus” rapidly became “bats are responsible for COVID-19”. The ease and speed with which lies such as these are shared on social media accelerates the spread of disinformation and substantially amplifies the repercussions in the real world. Would you ever entrust the care of someone who is ill to a landscape architect? Or the design of a bridge to an origami specialist? Well, then, why not put your faith in Biology to get a more reliable, wide-ranging vision of
this natural phenomenon known as a “pandemic” and to glean an understanding of how things really are on the planet on which we live? This is the perspective of a naturalist. It is difficult to define viruses. They are not even cells, but something simpler, because they are formed only by a protein casing and by nucleic acids. They are utterly ancient micro-organisms that have been circulating for more than three billion years, and so they are certainly very well-adapted and successful; we only arrived 250,000 years ago, just to put the earlier figure in context. We know that they cannot reproduce themselves under their own steam – they need host cells in order to do so. Darwin’s theory of evolution applies to all life on Earth, including viruses, which – from the time of their first appearance – have gradually become specialised at reproducing themselves and surviving as effectively as possible within other living beings, diversifying into a large number of different types. Every viral form ends up living in equilibrium with its host, which over time develops an adaptive immunity. This means that the host survives this sort of “parasitism” and the virus can prosper and propagate. The event that can unbalance this equilibrium is the so-called “spillover”, the jump from one species to another. This occurs following a rare, casual mutation that changes something in the virus and, if the mutation is favourable and if there are, at that time, suitable conditions such as proximity to another species, then a new virus tries to expand in the new host. Even when the new host species is a human being, in most cases the virus turns out to be innocuous, but sometimes it can cause pathologies of varying levels of seriousness, from the common cold to HIV. The human species is showing itself to be the ideal host for viruses, thanks to our presence across the entire planet, our social habits, the ease with which we can move from one continent to another – all factors that facilitate the dissemination of the infection. Sometimes the virus adapts in a particular way that shelters it against any excess damage caused to the health of the host, meaning that it shows itself to be innocuous for certain “parasitic” subjects (our species calls them “asymptomatic” subjects) and so the virus not only does not risk being killed along with the host, it actually increases its possibility of spreading to other individuals. It would seem, then, that we have no way out, but in truth there is a way to reduce the risk: we simply need to stop increasing our numbers and invading every natural habitat and every virgin territory, deforesting, polluting, hunting indiscriminately, causing climate change…Once and for all, if we stop changing the natural equilibriums and even altering the behaviour of other species, we will greatly reduce the opportunities to come
