by Hamilton Davis
It’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I had trouble taking seriously some of the injunctions from experts about how to cope with the virus. Don’t get close to people and sneeze virus droplets all over them! I was okay with that—made perfect sense. What frankly didn’t make sense to me was the constant yammering about washing your hands. Of course, people need to wash their hands, as well as brush their teeth, and change their sheets every couple of months. But this Covid beast has driven the whole world to its collective knees, and you’re telling me we can stop it with hand washing. Really?
It evoked for me the early 1950s, when elementary school teachers all over the country were drilling their second, third and fourth graders to “duck and cover, ” to dive under their little wooden desks and hold their heads to protect themselves against an atomic bomb attack. I was in high school in the early 1950s, and I have no memory of that particular idiocy at all—any high school teacher who tried it would have sacrificed any credibility he or she had.
But those little kids were hitting the deck on every signal. The one enduring lesson they might have taken away would have been an early appreciation of how ridiculous adults could be if they were terrified of the trip to instant oblivion promised by a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
Anyway, I sort of washed my hands a little more than usual, although I could never get into any of the singing songs as a mnemonic for how long the process should take; and I never even considered stuff like training myself not to touch my face, which some serious people I knew were doing. What the hell, I thought, maybe if I get it I’ll survive it…
This minor league irresponsibility lasted until a week or so ago, when I read an amazing piece in the London Review of Books, one of my favorite sources of very high quality, idiosyncratic journalism, for which the Brits are justifiably famous. The Brits can really write, like the French can really cook. The author of this essay enabled me to actually envision the virus as a perfectly familiar archetype, the schoolyard bully, big, strong, nasty and potentially dangerous, but with real weaknesses. The best way for ordinary kids to survive the schoolyard is to understand weaknesses.
The essay was written by Rupert Beale, a researcher at the spectacularly-credentialed Francis Crick Institute in London. Beale’s specialty is teasing out the pathways by which viruses, particularly corona viruses, invade and take over mammal cells. So the Covid-19 beast looming over us now is right in his wheelhouse. Much of the piece is a fast-paced overview of the current world state of the Covid battle, coupled with a pretty dense primer on the biology and genetics of viruses. Beale doesn’t dumb down the science, and even though he is as good writer on the subject as you are likely to find, it’s easy to get lost in the interplay of DNA and RNA molecules in the dance. In fact, your faithful correspondent was a wallflower at that dance, and a quick Googlized tour through the genetics didn’t help much. Those of my tiny corps who lack background in propeller-head biology and genetics will have to invest an afternoon to figure it out.
What did jump out at me and set me off on my schoolyard metaphor was Beale’s description of the virus itself, with a focus on its size. He introduces his piece by recounting his introduction to coronaviruses 20 years ago. Coronaviruses are RNA viruses.
“Their special cunning” Beale writes, “is in the huge length of their RNA genome. RNA is much less stable than DNA, so RNA viruses tend to be short. We measure them approximately in kilobases (kb) of information. Polio is a mere 7 kb, influenza stacks up at 14, (Covid-1) is 30 kb.” That is close to the limit of information for RNA, he adds, “about as long as a strand of RNA can be without collapsing.” Okay, so there we have really big size, but I am reading “close to collapse” as weakness.
Beale confirms that toward the end of the piece.
“For all its huge genome and clever tricks,” Beale writes, “(COVID-19) has significant vulnerabilities. It has a fairly feeble fatty envelope, which it needs to sneak into cells.” Then Beale came right at me:
That’s destroyed by soap, and by alcohol—so washing your hands carefully or smearing them in alcohol hand gel will kill the virus…expect to be bored to tears over the coming months by pious injunctions to wash your hands. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s going to reduce the risk at least somewhat.
OMG! Who knew? We’re going to have to learn to love pious injunctions. As an aid, I am choosing to think of hand washing as a punch in the bully’s “fairly feeble fatty” nose, the last resort for an ordinary kid when the big guy’s got his mitts on you.
If that new mindset doesn’t work for you, however, Beale offers you a second mental refuge. Here it is, in full:
The second great vulnerability of the virus is that it has to take great pains copying its genome. All RNA viruses (influenza, for example) have a special enzyme that copies RNA into RNA. These RNA-dependent RNA polymerases are usually very sloppy copyists. They don’t bother with proofreading, and make huge numbers of errors. This high mutation rate enables them to evolve very rapidly; that’s one reason we need a new flu vaccine every year. Coronaviruses (one type of RNA virus) have to be much more careful, or else their huge genome will accumulate too many errors. Their mutation rate is therefore lower, so we may be to develop a fairly effective vaccine—though it will take a year or two, assuming it’s possible at all.
I read that last sentence as a marginally hopeful augury—its huge size reduces its mutability. But as for the rest of it, I have no clue at all. If any of my tiny corps of brilliant readers can render it in English, send it to me. I’ll share it with the rest of the corps. We could even send it to Phil Scott and his friends and the denizens of the Legislature.