~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The word corona was first commonly used in the 16th century. It’s a Latin word that means crown and described the circle of light around the sun most visible during a solar eclipse. Coronavirus was named thus in 1968 because the shape of the virus if you look at her under a microscope is crown-like. She has cousins – the common cold, mostly seasonal and generally not a killer; SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome); and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome). The latter two are dangerous but considered contained worldwide.
The coronavirus we’re dealing with, officially COVID-19 (Corona VIrus Disease first isolated in 2019) seems to come and go – big outbreaks in Italy, and then it’s contained; in New York City, and then it wanes. But Corona is going nowhere, she’s just settling in, waiting for openings that keep popping . . . open. Until we get a vaccine, she’ll be searching us out.
In the meantime, the opening and closing of bars in America does come and go these days, mostly because of how this country rolls with the politicians. Because they do not seem to believe in the scientists studying the coronavirus in order to help us, the pols jerk back and forth in a leaderless way so that no one knows what’s going on. When politicians think the virus is gone (lack of testing makes them think – I’m sorry; makes them not think – that all is safe out here), they let us loose.
And we are not blameless ourselves, because we are eager to be let loose.
But then ‘Rona returns, and we have to go home again.
We are all longing for normalcy, but these are simply not normal times, and we cannot manufacture the falsehood of everything being just fine so that we can roam as we used to. “Where is my freedom?” we whine.
Well, it’s not here, and it’s not now.
Cora likes it when her best pals, the politicians, they of faint heart, let us out to the bars and beaches, to the church services and the graduation-wedding-birthday-Fourth of July parties. Weak-willed, they make self-serving decisions in hope of votes rather than their constituents’ health. The pols open the cities and states, and in she comes, Coronavirus surfacing eagerly wherever there’s an unmasked face.
She’s an opportunist. She’s looking for the mouth, the nose, the passages to the lungs. She knows her way.
And she has her way.
As the scientists say, she is “protean.” This means that she is able to change frequently and easily. This word comes from a Greek god, Proteus, who was practiced in assuming different forms, which ‘Rona does – one of the problems the scientists are discovering in their maddeningly complex and illusive search for a vaccine.
Because we can’t see her, Coronavirus gets to go everywhere. We can’t swat her with a fly swatter. We can’t trap her in a roach-hotel. We can’t contain her in a cage. If we could see her, perhaps we could drown her, fry her, spray her away. But she’s sneaky, wily, invisibly busy searching for a host. We host her. And she’s having a heyday in the U.S. Our numbers, which some want to keep a secret and may even be undercounts anyway, are the highest in the world – as of 6-26-20 – 2,414,870 infected and 124,325 dead.
Some countries around the world pegged her early-on. They got her number and shut down all access to human respiratory systems. Cori had to flee to other countries. It didn’t bother her – the world is wide and many of its leaders dim.
