Viruses messing with our minds and bodies

The contemporary damages to our minds and bodies are becoming more and more evident as the COVID-19 menace continues to spread around the world.

Scientists are proving that the pandemic has hijacked people’s lives, families and work. And, it has hijacked both their bodies and minds in ways that they might not be aware of.

Professors at Arizona State University and the University of New Mexico have written that “As we see it, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is a sort of zombie virus, turning people not into the undead but rather into the unsick. By interfering with our bodies’ normal immune response and blocking pain, the virus keeps the infected on their feet, spreading the virus.”

People think of zombies as the stuff of science fiction. But in the biological world, zombies inhabit ant hills, a single-cell parasite that completes its life cycle by leading rodents into the jaws of predators and influencing their host’s behavior in ways that enhance the viruses’ evolutionary fitness.

It is the unsick that spread the virus most readily. About 40% of those with SRS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic spreaders, never showing symptoms at all. And

those who do show symptoms are most contagious in the two days before symptoms appear. Why people don’t feel sick earlier — or sick at all — might be part of the evolutionary strategy of SARSCoV-2.

That virus silences the body’s alarm signals that otherwise would orchestrate anti-viral defenses.

Interferon activity makes people feel more depressed and socially withdrawn — so when the novel Coronavirus impedes interferon activity, mood is lifted, sociality is increased and you feel less sick.

The virus decreases pain perception. Normally, pain motivates us to hunker down when we need to heal. But SARS-CoV-2 dampens the body’s response to infection.

It hinders pro-inflammatory molecules that help spur the immune response. This too makes hosts feel better than they should.

How SARS-CoV-2 evolved to manipulate humans is still speculation. The virus could have first evolved in other mammals.

More research is needed to determine whether new variants make people feel unsick for longer.

We must take seriously the possibility that the virus is zombifying us — altering our behavior in ways that help perpetuate it. By keeping people feeling good when they are capable of spreading the virus.

Many of us have unwittingly acted as vehicles for its propagation, with stunning implications. Our behavior might not be in our own evolutionary interests. Instead, the unsick may be serving the virus.