Dear Coronavirus,
Wow! What an rise to fame; a regular overnight sensation. You should be very proud.
I have to warn you, though. Your experience within the human population is going to be quite different than the good old days when you were living it up among the pangolins. I know that a big part of your act is that you move in and help weed out the weakest among the herd. It's a great service that you offer to nature; but here’s the thing - humans have figured out that there’s irreplaceable value embedded inside those bodies that are not as strong as everyone else’s. There's an immeasurable worth that has nothing to do with the desirability of their genetic transmission and everything to do with the transcendent spark of the divine that glows inside them.
You may find this hard to believe - in all your forays around the animal kingdom, I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like this, but - we humans will fight tooth and nail to protect those who are old and sick. We are willing to deprive our young of their social lives, to suffer trillions in economic damage, to temporarily suspend our constitutional right to assemble, all in the hopes that we can slow you down. We’ve got some epic life-saving equipment in our world - but our nightmare scenario is having the number of sick outpace the number of beds; sending sick people home to die because we ran out of ventilators is an option that frightens us more than the prospect of shutting down entire industries and sparking a worldwide economic crisis.
It’s just not going to be as easy for you as it once was. You are going to go looking for the next human host and come up empty for awhile because - paradoxically - we love one another enough to stay away from each other for the time being.
Gosh, I’m sorry to have to break this to you after you’ve already come this far. Don’t feel too bad, though. You’ve inspired some legendary memes and epic toilet paper shortages, which is more than most viruses can say.
Bon Voyage on your journey back to eventual obscurity.
Sincerely,
The Human Race
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