COVID-19 and the ecology of disease

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Editor's note: In these self-quarantining times, we’d do well to understand how a certain co-passenger travels.  This co-passenger is discerning to a fault, sifting through opportunities, threats, habitats, hosts, and experiences. Traditional belief holds that it is barbaric, hijacking and proliferating in its chosen dominion. But Geoffrey Smith found otherwise. In 2010, he and his team at Imperial College, London, watched as a well-coordinated attack unfolded before their eyes. There were millions of co-passengers—and yes, they were ruthless. But they also displayed mutual understanding. If one was in the midst of plundering, the others stayed away and marched ahead to claim what hadn’t been taken yet. These were vaccinia viruses. And they, as the Imperial College team discovered through their video microscopes, had a hive mentality. Viruses are intelligent. These co-passengers are seasoned travellers, having hitched rides for billions of years. But we take them for granted. This underestimation has led to a proliferation of zoonotic diseases (i.e. diseases that spread from animals to humans) over the last 30-odd years. At the time of writing this, there are 207,615 confirmed cases of …