Goodbye 2020

Goodbye 2020

It has always bothered me to hear people talk about how some activity or other “puts in time” or “passes away the hours”. The time we have is too valuable for us to want it gone. But if there has ever been a year that many of us will be happy to see the back end of, it’s 2020.

Early in the year we heard rumours of a disease from Asia that seemed to be spreading rapidly. Before long there were suggestions that this might be a pandemic and by March, we all knew we were in for trouble.

Since the spring the world has been subject to viral devastation unlike anything that has been seen for a century. But COVID shouldn’t have been a surprise, scientists who study the epidemiology of viral disease have been warning us for decades that something like this was inevitable.

When I was studying veterinary medicine in university, I spent one summer working in a lab animal facility in Ottawa. One of the animal species in that facility was the green monkey. They were beautiful intelligent animals, but everyone who worked there was scared of them.

The veterinarian who was the head of animal care for the building about a decade earlier had been bitten by one of these monkeys and later died of a disease caused by Simian Herpes B Virus. Knowing this history, I was always careful around the monkeys and worried about either being infected by one of them or even carrying a disease causing agent from them out into the world. From my studies in vet school, I was aware of the potential of viruses to cause great harm. It was from these experiences that I came up with the idea for VIRAL.

VIRAL is a story about a pandemic that is far worse than COVID-19. COVID is caused by a virus from the coronavirus family and typically kills about 1.5% of people infected. That means for every hundred people who get COVID, between one and two are likely to die.

There are other viruses that have much worse statistics. The virus in VIRAL is from the filovirus family. Diseases caused by these agents can cause mortality rates of 95%! If you are infected by a virus of this kind, you will almost certainly die.

As frightening as all of this sounds, it actually can be seen as a reminder of how lucky we are. The pandemic we are currently experiencing could have been much more devastating. If this outbreak had come from a different family of viruses, the outcome could have been horrifically worse.

That’s an important thing to remember when we commiserate about what COVID has done to the world. We’ve been forced to spend time in our homes, many people have lost their jobs and we are all missing friends and relatives that we are unable to visit. But the world goes on, society hasn’t collapsed and vaccines are on the way. It seems quite likely that the planet will return to a much more normal state before long.

Although VIRAL is a story about devastation and loss, I think it can also be seen as a reminder of how lucky we have actually been in 2020. Things could have been much worse.