Yes, we all know about the corona virus and Covid-19 and how it is ravaging the whole world now. But have we stopped to notice the stark similarity that exists between humans and viruses? Here it is.
The virus - It infects a human, grows in the incubation period, transmits to 2-3 people (12 people if it is measles) and finally kills a fraction of the infected people. What does a viral infection really mean? It is hijacking our molecular machinery for it's own reproduction and survival. Therefore, it is noteworthy that a benign virus has higher chance of survival than a lethal one. Because, a lethal one kills the host thereby killing itself. Now we can understand why the seasonal flu virus is still surviving whereas the small pox virus has got extinct (We were successful in eradicating small pox not just because it was lethal but also because we had effective vaccine). Moral of the story is, a virus which transmits effectively and benign has high chances of survival over a highly lethal one. That is precisely the reason we have a corona virus (mortality rate of 2%) pandemic but not an Ebola (mortality rate of 50%) pandemic. It's counter intuitive but true that a less lethal virus is causing more damage for us than a more lethal one because the former stays in the humans population longer than the latter one.
The Humans - We occupy a land, survive and reproduce there with the help of agriculture, domestication and industry. If the land becomes unusable or hostile for any number of reasons, we move. This is how humans have been occupying various parts of the planet for centuries. The comparison between the humans and virus is, if we are like the virus, the place we live (our land and habitat) is like the host for us. Similar to the virus, the more benign we are towards our host, the longer we survive (that's why the whole sustainable farming and lifestyle movement). If we rape the land we live, we kill ourselves. Moral of the story is, if we reproduce responsibly and be benign, we have a higher chance of survival in comparison to our current state where are reproducing irresponsibly and destroying the host where we live.
A meta point - Unlike the corona virus which has infected 6,00,000 people implying it still has over 7 billion hosts to infect, we have virtually exhausted all the places on earth to live. So that's a huge phase difference between humans and the corona virus. We are left with our last host (the global village) since we have no technology to move to other hosts yet (other planets), we are in a precarious situation. If we are reckless with pandemics and climate change, we might end up killing our last host thereby killing ourselves before we make the transition to other potential hosts.
A meta meta point - If the earth is host to us and if we are host to the corona virus, unfortunately the corona virus has made a bad choice in choosing humans to be it's host in the 21st century. Because, the virus might have over 7 billions hosts left to infect, but if we kill our host, the virus will die too because it's host will be killed in the process.
In conclusion - Ideally, we should live like the gut bacteria. In the absence of our capacity to do so, we should be like corona virus and not Ebola for our own survival. Strange but true!!
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