Traitors and Traitor Cells in Pandemic
America on a ventilator. Gasping for breath. Pain. Terror. Isolated. The fun all coughed away. A thick sputum of anguish clogging its airways. Why? Why us, the greatest nation on the planet? We should have been immune. We certainly acted as if we were. We deserved immunity. The most severely damaged among us refusing to acknowledge the pandemic, refusing to take the precautions our doctors prescribed. What was it about this disease that made us treat it so differently from all the other diseases? After all, if we had pneumonia and the doctor prescribed antibiotics, we took them. What was different about this disease that spread so easily among us. What made us gather by the thousands on beaches, in rallies, in dances, in bars, in celebrations? The epidemiologists told us that we could defeat the disease if we isolated, wore our masks, and sanitized our hands, and yet a significant portion of us refused to take those precautions. It was almost as if we felt and believed that we deserved the infection. This was not a conscious decision. Knowing they will die, people often make a conscious decision to write a will. The decision to refuse to take precautions was not consciously made; it was a decision none the less. An unconscious decision. From whence arose that decision? The refuseniks participated in the infectious process at a social level, just as the human bodies participated in the infectious process at a cellular level. The outer mirrors the inner. The social process of the pandemic mirrors the physiological process of the pandemic.
Thinking about pneumonia for a moment, there is a significant difference between pneumonia and COVID. Pneumonia is an individual experience. We do not have pneumonia pandemics. At least not in modern times. If a person contracts pneumonia the doctor prescribes an antibiotic and bed rest. No one is told to wear a mask. The house is not quarantined. The social experience of pneumonia is circumscribed. COVID on the other hand is a social experience as well as an individual experience. COVID threatens the entire population. It is so easily transmissible that we have to take social precautions. With pneumonia one calls the office and says I won’t be in for a couple of days, I have a pneumonia. With CORONA society has to limit everyone’s exposure and that involves a change in social behavior. The bars are closed. The gyms are closed and so too the yoga studios. In order to avoid infection, an infection that could well be fatal, one must take precautions, and those precautions do not stop a disease once it’s been acquired, they stop the acquisition of the disease. You don’t get better from taking precautions; you just don’t get sick. The payoff is the absence of something. Unlike with pneumonia, where the reward is the disappearance of symptoms like high fever and congestion. If one contracts pneumonia, one takes the antibiotic. Very few people refuse to take the antibiotic. You’re sick; you take the antibiotic; you get better. There’s a tangible reward for conscientious behavior. With COVID there’s no comparable tangible reward.
There’s another way in which COVID and pneumonia are different. The pneumonia bacteria grow and reproduce in the airways of the lungs. COVID is different. It does not grow and reproduce in the airways. It grows inside cells in the lungs.Infection by the SARS-COVID virus requires the active participation of the human body. By now most of us recognize the virus in depictions. We are aware of the globular projections that dot the surface of the virus, usually shown in red; these projections are the means by which the virus attaches to a receptor on human cells in the lungs that normally develop into respiratory tract cells. The projections are called “spike proteins.” The spike proteins match proteins—called receptors—located on all respiratory cells. Once bound to the respiratory cell, the virus injects its genetic material, takes over the metabolic machinery of the host, makes copies of itself, ruptures the host cell, and releases its progeny. The host cell is not easy for the virus to infect; this requires the help of “traitor” cells also located in the lungs. The traitor cells have a normal function in the absence of disease. The CORONA virus makes use of the normal function to perpetuate itself.These traitor cells activate the coronavirus projections (the spike proteins) to allow the virus to more easily enter the target cell. Some people are more vulnerable than others, and once the virus gains entry into their respiratory tract cells, the virus kills the cells and then the person develops acute respiratory distress syndrome in which their lungs fill up with fluid and they are put on a respirator. It is often the last stage before death.
The COVID disease process in individuals mirrors the COVID disease process in the society. The comparison is worth pursuing. In society one infected individual is analogous to an individual virus particle. Society is analogous to the larger population the infected individual is entering. In the human body, the virus particle attaches via its spike protein to a receptor on a lung cell, gains entry facilitated by the “traitor cells,” and multiplies, eventually destroying the host cell and releasing thousands of copies of the virus. In the same way that a virus-infected cell passes on the infection to other cells, an infected individual passes the virus to other humans, each of which then becomes infected and passes the infection on. Now if the society is protected by a vaccine the infected individual cannot transmit the infection just as the body of an immunized person is protected and the virus cannot infect it. Unlike society, a vulnerable individual who is not immunized cannot protect themselves against infection. That’s where the masks and social distancing and quarantine come in. They can prevent the infected individual from spreading the virus. Now societies have “traitor cells” just like bodies do. In the human body the traitor cell facilitates the entry of the virus into a vulnerable cell. In society the traitor cells are individuals who refuse to wear masks, who refuse to social distance, and who refuse to quarantine. In society the traitor individuals facilitate the spread of the disease.
It is helpful to compare the COVID disease process in individuals and in society because it gives us insight into the social processes that the virus uses in a pandemic just as the virus uses physiological processes to spread in an individual. Until an effective and safe vaccine is widely available, the only protection society has against COVID is social distancing, masks, and disinfection.
Star Man
