The global crisis of COVID-19 pandemic has upended the entire world. The increasing death toll is appalling and so is the dreaded silence of being trapped in the panopticon of loneliness. With 25 lakh people infected and nearly 1,76,000 submissions to death (As on April 22), this pandemic is indeed one of the worst disasters humanity has ever seen. However, the horror of this story does not end with just the appalling figures of death and infection rate. The world economy is estimated to be hit by a period of depression as an aftermath of this assault on humanity. A multitude of people will lose their jobs, other thousands will lose their shelter, scores of people will lose their financial security and a large number of small and medium-scale industries will be buried into their graves. To this, add the vast multitude of people who have already lost their family and friends. The pain and sufferings that they are enduring cannot be jotted down in words. This chapter of humanity has already left an indelible imprint of the horrors of nature on our minds.
No matter how badly we wish for the pandemic to end its assault on humanity as soon as possible and pray that such a disaster may never show itself on the face of the earth, one question still pops up in our mind. Is it the end or if nature has yet another unprecedented ball of agony to throw at us? There are many viruses and pathogens which exist in this world which we know little about. It is not an exaggeration to claim that we are living in an age of pandemics and, God forbids, the next ‘Disease X’ could be more cataclysmic than COVID-19. Let us turn to our history for some answers. Not long ago, in 2017, about 54.5% of the Mongolian Saiga (a species of antelope) was wiped out by a sudden outbreak of a disease which was popularly termed as the goat plague. It had a mortality rate of 90% and was caused by a virus. Fortunately, the disease is not transmissible to humans, at least not yet. However, it would take just a simple mutation in the genome of the virus- a change of just two amino acids, and it will become infectious to humans. We should not forget the Nipah and Zika viruses as well which have already wreaked havoc in our history.
There have been many people who have underscored the idea that this pandemic is nature’s way of reclaiming what it has lost. Why cannot it be? All these pandemics have been deeply rooted in the destruction of the environment and the natural habitat of flora and fauna, in one way or the other. A majority of the emerging infections originate in animals. The outbreak of these pandemics is in some way related to the interaction of the wildlife with the humans. The COVID-19 pandemic is being claimed to have been originated from a wet-market in China where people come in close contact with animals, both living and dead. Such places are ideal breeding grounds for such pandemics. Just take the example of bats. Their body is home to a lot of pathogens which may or may not be infectious to humans. But in wet-markets such as that in Wuhan, the pathogens can easily find their way into the human body, either directly or through an intermediate host. The virus which causes the diseases such as HIV, Zika, SARS, MERS, COVID-19, Nipah follows the same trend of the perilous novel viruses which originate in animals and ultimately take the human body as its host, claiming thousands of lives.
Animal markets, disrupted wildlife habitat, and expansion of urban and agricultural land have brought wild animals in close contact with humans. Whenever, we invade an intact habitat, traffic the wild animals or blindly accept everything as edible, we run the risk of making close contacts with various type of animals which intensifies our risk of contracting about 1.6 million unknown pathogens which naturally reside in the bodies of those animals. The effect of ‘Humanity’ on the surrounding environment, particularly on animals, is allowing novel viruses to infect, harm and kill us.
This pandemic is indeed a call of nature to mend our mistakes of the past and take some serious steps for the conservation of wildlife and its habitat. Nature’s balance is very critical and the distance that nature has created between humans and wild-animals is meant for a reason. Millions of acres of forest land are cleared every year for the expansion of the civilisation. Scores of animals of every kind are slaughtered every year to feed the hunger of an ever-growing population. It is time to realise that everything on this planet is not edible, every inch of land is not meant for human use, every animal in the forest does not dream of living in a metropolis. We need to recognise our boundaries. We need to recognise the fact that we are not the sole inhabitants on this planet and all its resources are not under our monopoly. After having seen the horrendous aftermaths of our incessant hunger, if we still fail to learn our lessons and acknowledge our boundaries, then this pandemic will be just a beginning.
The Resilient Knight 