We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s…

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work causing decades of morbidity and mortality. /1 https://t.co/cQ2LadrK6x

And it’s insidious, because those chronic deaths won’t resemble the acute phase. So few will make the link, until it’s too late for whole generations of people living shorter and sicker lives. Heart disease in the 20th century seems likely to have been this mechanism at work. /2

We spent most of that century thinking diet and smoking caused it, and/or lack of exercise. Your doctor today will still advise on all of those things as prophylactics. We tend to use physical and chemical models for the body, like it’s one of the machines we make ourselves. /3

But it’s an organism. And as we’re discovering, fundamentally microbial perhaps in every aspect of how it works. All life on Earth began as microbial life, why would it ever cease? It built the ‘macrofauna’ too, it likely IS that macrofauna. /4

Human bodies and other living organisms are microbial cities. None of us living in a city think the city itself is some distinct thing from the people living in it. We know people make cities and make up cities. That’s likely all every living thing on the planet is. /5

A ‘city’ of microbes. Microbes can also be effectively immortal, our own mortality is them building something new, some new trial. ‘Sydney’ is potentially immortal, the buildings within it are mortal. We’re all just microbial experiments, made by microbial property developers. /6

And our prejudice and misunderstanding of scale assumes that microbes are simple life, and we’re complex life. Microbes do things that we would have no hope of ever doing. They built the atmosphere, the only reason life exists on this planet. /7

It doesn’t take a lot to see ‘macro’ anything as a highly *simplified* creation of micro something. The Sydney built environment is no match for the sophistication of the biology of your body, and that body in turn is a much simpler thing than the microbial life that made it. /8

While most now agree processes like endosymbiosis lead to this sort of microbial construction of macro organisms, at the ‘micro’ level, some or even many would draw a line at taking that right up to the full macro level of the macrofauna we know. /9

But why would it stop at the micro level? Why would billions of years of microbial proliferation, still with us today underlying all life, need some distinct ‘macro’ process to sit on top of it? Just look, macro things are always pretty simple, relatively. /10

They have clear boundaries, identifiable shapes and behaviours. Non-living objects the same. But head towards the microscopic level, even of atoms, and shit gets weird spectacularly fast. We still haven’t accepted that lesson from quantum science either. /11

A ‘macro’ object is not complex, it’s simple-as. Compared to the quantum soup it emerges from. Anyway, far too much for a Twitter thread. To return to Covid, infection is dangerous. Infection with anything is dangerous. Microbes are constantly doing property development. /12

To them the killing of a human is like us bulldozing a building to make way for a newer one. They don’t lose any sleep over it. Infection is, I would still wager, the root of much of the disease afflicting humankind. That’s how microbes roll, it’s them building. /13

And again, the longer term disease state will often not resemble the on-ramp of acute infection. That’s how they get away with it. From the overall perspective of life on Earth, it may not matter if humans end up swept away by their gullible ‘living with’ infections. /14

But it does matter, if you’re human. There are smart ways to sustain this ‘macro’ form for a lot longer, if we’re much more careful about infection. The immune system we’re now happy to make the frontline of this fight evolved *because* of the constant microbial threat. /15

To now celebrate immunity as some ‘natural’ process is like cheering on wars. Your immune system is the legacy of millions of years of microbial war. It quite likes not having to be constantly fighting threats. /end