Patient Zero to Pandemic

This happened yesterday:

"This is not just the president returning to the White House, this may be patient zero. This is virus coming back to the White House." -@Acosta

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) October 5, 2020

More on that thought today:

Dr Jonathan Reiner: "I think POTUS was infected with coronavirus for at least a week before he was admitted to the hospital...I think he's the superspreader. And I think the reason the WH will not have the CDC do a formal check...is they're concerned patient zero might be POTUS." pic.twitter.com/zQGc6Nqh5U

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 7, 2020

As he always claimed, he alone knows the truth--including about when he became infected with the virus.

At some time or another, we have all heard or read about one of the most famous superspreaders in history: Typhoid Mary.  More than a hundred years ago, in 1907, "about 3,000 New Yorkers had been infected by Salmonella typhi, and probably Mary was the main reason for the outbreak." 

Like the President, Mary too was not cooperative.  But, she was not the President.  Ultimately, she had no choice but to yield to the law.  "At the end she was forced to give samples. Mary’s stool was positive for Salmonella typhi and thus she was transferred to North Brother Island to Riverside Hospital, where she was quarantined in a cottage."

If only we could quarantine the President until inauguration day in January 2021, and then load him in Marine 1 and send him to his true home--Moscow, Russia!

Covid-19 is a contagious virus, and like many other pathogens that humans have encountered over the centuries, it doesn't seem like it will go away easily or soon.  This virus is smarter than ebola, which too hastily kills its host.  It is also smarter than the Sars virus, which made patients with Sars get very sick. 

The virus had a staggeringly high fatality rate –almost one in five patients died – but this meant that it was relatively easy to identify those who were infected, and quarantine them. There was no extra spread from people without symptoms, and as a bonus, Sars took a relatively long time to incubate before it became contagious, which gave contact-tracers extra time to find anyone who might be infected before they could pass it on.

For a virus, Covid-19 hits a sweet spot: It stays without provoking symptoms in its host, while the host goes around shedding rapidly increasing viral loads.  And then the host begins to show symptoms.  By then, quite a few others are already infected.  The virus lives on and prospers, much to our discomfort and death.

Is there any chance that Covid-19 will just go away, like a miracle that the President claimed would happen?

 “With Covid-19, the reservoir is now us,” says Perlman. In fact, it’s become so much of a human virus that scientists have begun to wonder if it will spread the other way around – from humans to wildlife, in a kind of “reverse spillover”, if you will. This would make it even harder to stamp out.

Apparently this reverse spillover has already happened!

It's jumped species. https://t.co/QDbvsZ4xOr

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 6, 2020

It didn't take long from Patient Zero in the White House!

So, what is the way forward?

[Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist at the University of Chicago] "thinks now more than ever we should be focused on whittling down the pool of human pathogens." 

“I hope this is a period in which we can reflect on, you know, what sort of illnesses we want to work toward eradicating,” she says. “There are lots of pathogens out there – most people don't appreciate just how many.”

Yes.  We will start with removing this President from the White House, and then President Biden can spearhead the rest of the effort.