An extract from Fever
they knew The Fever came out of Africa. They knew it was two viruses that combined, one from people, and one from bats. In those days they wrote a lot about it, before everyone died.
One doctor wrote in a magazine that nobody knew exactly how it all began, but this is how they thought it might have happened: A man somewhere in tropical Africa lay down under a mango tree. The man’s resistance was low, because he was HIV-positive and not being treated for it.
There was already one corona virus in the man’s blood. There was nothing strange about that. Corona viruses were quite common. In the era before The Fever they knew of at least four that caused flu and cold symptoms in people.
Corona viruses also occurred in animals. Mammals and birds.
In the mango tree there was a bat, with a different kind of corona virus in its blood.
The bat was sick. Diarrhoea caused it to defecate on the face of the man under the tree, his eyes, or his nose, or his mouth. The second corona virus was now in the man’s blood, the two viruses multiplying together in the same cells of the man’s windpipe. And their genetic material combined. A new corona virus was born — one that could infect other people easily when inhaled, and with the ability to make them extremely ill.
The man under the mango tree lived in a poor community, where people were crammed together, and where the incidence of HIV was high. He quickly infected others. The new virus spread through the community, and kept on mutating. One mutation was just perfect. It spread easily through the air, taking long enough to kill for each person to have infected many others.
One of the family members of the man under the mango tree worked at an airport in the nearby city. The family member was incubating the perfect virus. He coughed on a passenger, just before the woman took the flight to England.
In England there was a big international sporting event.
All the first world countries had a protocol for deadly, infectious diseases. Even most of the developing countries had extensive plans for such an incident. There were guidelines and systems for an epidemic. In theory, these should have worked.
But nature paid no heed to theories. And nor did human fallibility.