Coronavirus: How Soon We Forget – Same Playbook, Different Virus
I have been sitting back, listening to and watching the crushing plan “they” have designed for us. I have been viewing this fiasco through the lens of history. I wrote this article to give you some perspective. I couldn’t help but think when this COVID19 blitz started, “How soon we forget…” Over the last three weeks, unless you have been cloistered in a monastery in Tibet, you have been bombarded with at least 2.1 billion media mentions regarding a new form of coronavirus that has spread rapidly around the world. As a comparison, when Ebola was in the news last year, it received a mere 16.3 million media mentions. The world economy has ground to a stop over the pandemic spread of coronavirus SARS-CoV2, the proper name for the virus. This name was chosen because the virus is genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. Coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19, is the illness caused by the SARS-CoV2 virus. The two terms are used interchangeably but the words are not synonyms. According to the CDC, coronaviruses are named for the crown-like spikes on their surface. There are 36 coronaviruses in the family Coronaviridae. The viruses are known to cause respiratory or intestinal infections in humans and some animals. These common, mostly benign respiratory viruses were first identified in humans in the mid-1960s. The coronaviruses that commonly infect people are: 229E (alpha coronavirus), NL63 (alpha coronavirus), OC43 (beta coronavirus), HKU1 (beta coronavirus). These four common human viruses cause 10–20% of respiratory infections worldwide and are present on all continents. Most likely, you have been exposed to, and perhaps ill from, a coronavirus infection at some point in your life and may have some level of natural immunity to this virus.