Qui habitat: coexistence or extinction of SARS‐CoV‐2?

With the arrival of the change from legal winter time to summer time last Sunday 29 March, I also decided to change. In Portugal, the confinement had already lasted three weeks, and the state of emergency had been declared. I started by changing and adjusting the alarm clock radio station that woke me with the morning news about the COVID‐19 contagion. But this praxis was causing anxiety and anguish and mental health is more important than the ‘écume des jours’. I switched to a radio station almost exclusively for classical music. I woke up in a sort of dream that Sunday. A set of melodic and angelic polyphonic voices absorbed me to the point of doubting whether I was dreaming or awake. I had my mobile phone near me and, luckily, I managed to ‘Shazam’ the music: Josquin des Prez Qui habitat was the app’s result. A quick search in Wikipedia gives me another clue: Qui Habitat Psalm 91, a protective psalm, invocation in difficult times. An anti‐plague Old Testament Christian psalm:

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High … / For he will deliver thee from the snare of the fowler/ And from the deadly pestilence/ Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night/ Nor for the arrow that flieth by day/ For the pestilence that walketh in darkness/ There shall no evil befall thee …

Qui habitat in Latin – ‘he who inhabits’, clearly alluding to Christian God. Although this psalm may have been soothing, I wasn’t thinking about God. It was the virus and how we Homo sapiens became the chosen species. SARS‐CoV‐2 wants to live in and around us. As a highly contagious and emerging virus, it broke our immune barriers, and now runs to adapt us. We don’t know each other well, we didn’t (co)evolved like Farenholz would say (Combes and Simberloff 2005).

Run – screams the queen! RUN ALICE! – Well, in our country, said Alice, still panting a little, you’d generally get to somewhere else! ‐ If you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing. A slow sort of country! – said the Queen. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! (Carroll 1871: 23)

In other words, Leigh van Valen’s ‘Red Queen’ evolutionary hypothesis revisited (1973). We’ll have to run twice as fast to catch this new coronavirus, but what do we do when we catch it? Cohabit? Extinguish it? This debate isn’t new. It happened before with the smallpox virus (Lall 2015). Extinguish it or confine it to an ultra‐safe lab when we manage to capture it? We have to decide quickly what we want to do about it, so we can start our lives in relative safety.