What is your COVID-19 Pandemic Risk?

The Environmentalist is asking everyone who can to stay at home. For those who can't, and for everyone, wash your hands for 20 seconds, wipe down packages (and wash your hands), don't touch your face, and to stay 6ft/2 meters away from others, and learn your COVID-19 pandemic risk:

https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses
https://www.pandemic-footprint.com/your-pfi-footprint

Why is this disease so dangerous?  From our managing editor: "Thousands of years ago, a tiny bat drank at a stream or ate a bug, probably in a cave, and encountered a curious little organism called a virus that had killed all its hosts, until the bat didn't die.

The virus had a place to grow, and keep warm and mutate, while the little bat noticed that anyone - any predator - died when they came too close to the little bat.

The bats that gave that crown-shaped coronavirus a home; the virus killed the bat's enemies in return, and they both survived.

All we, the predators, had to do was leave the bat -- with its perfect -- Ridley Scott Alien-type blood -- alone. We didn't do that. Instead, we, humans, the most vulnerable species to the bat's deadly protector, caught the bat, put it under stress in a wet market, which lowered its ability to keep the virus at bay. That's because bats' internal temperature goes up when they fly. That's what made the bats immune. Flying. They can't fly in a cage.

After it had lost its battle with its host, terrified, sick, and trapped, someone killed that bat in that wet market where they set the coronavirus loose to wreak havoc on the world.

Does that make it the bat's fault?  No. It had been protecting us from that virus for thousands of years.  Does it make it one country's fault?  No. Stop the racism. Now.

Does it make it everyone's responsibility? Yes.

Now that it's loose, we all have to step up by sitting down, by isolating ourselves, which is a good time for everyone to reflect on how we have been using, and misusing, this planet and its other inhabitants.  It came from China this time. Next time, it might be from the rainforests burning in the Amazon, or from a virus frozen in the permafrost that is now melting.

Virus don't have a purpose other than to infect and kill cells and to replicate. What if they are defense mechanisms in exchange for protecting an immune host? What if bats had been protecting us by keeping it silent and inside the cave, rather than letting it loose?

We did this to ourselves by not leaving bats alone with its symbiotic protector. We took its winged home, and left it with only us as hosts. We did this to ourselves by encroaching, poaching, exploiting, and destroying the hosts' habitats.

#closedownallwetmarkets #stayathome #socialdistance #washyourhands

The only tool we have until testing is done everywhere (and that is not currently being done) is social distance.

Learn about CoronaVirus at this link:  https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses  You can measure your PFI footprint on the link (not an official link, but we post it because it may help to visualize the advantage of social distancing).  https://www.pandemic-footprint.com/your-pfi-footprint