A Glimpse into Our Future

After the COVID-19 pandemic is over, countries would want their economy to bounce back in a record time. This will be facilitated by unleashing factories at their full capacity; leading to more greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change.

The rise of global temperature following this event will force the ice caps to melt even faster, thus releasing deadly viruses that have been trapped in the permafrost for thousands of years! Some of these viruses are as old as 15,000 years.

These viruses are called giant viruses because their genome is incredibly massive, which means they’re complex viruses that our existing genetic database might not fully recognize. In a recent study, researchers identified 33 viruses ranging between 520 and 15,000 years old, 28 of them are unknown to science. Who knows how many of them are out there and the potential damage they could do to the human body.

With the ongoing coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, we were lucky that we had an existing idea of the genetic sequence of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is simply a new version of another virus that humanity dealt with before, known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). SARS caused an epidemic that affected 26 countries and led to over 8000 cases in 2003. As researchers noted “that 2019-nCoV (now known as SARS-CoV-2) is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus”, which has been studied before.

In order to develop an effective vaccine against any virus, we need to understand the virus and the way our immune system reacts to it. And in order to do it faster, you need to gather this knowledge faster. In the future, if a pandemic is unleashed by one of the deadly viruses that are trapped in the permafrost, the scale of damage it could cause would be beyond our comprehension because we hardly have any knowledge about these ancient viruses.

In summary, humanity is up for big surprises in the future if we don’t watch out for our behavior and the way we treat our planet.

References:

1. Wu, Aiping, et al. "Genome composition and divergence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) originating in China." Cell Host & Microbe (2020).
2. Zhong, Zhi-Ping, et al. "Glacier ice archives fifteen-thousand-year-old viruses." bioRxiv (2020).
3. Zhou, Peng, et al. "A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin." Nature (2020): 1-4.