And beyond the big numbers are big consequences: Many of those viruses bring adaptive benefits, not harms, to life on Earth, including ours. When you add the viruses infecting nonmammalian animals, plants, terrestrial bacteria, and every other possible host, the total comes to … lots. Mammals may carry at least 320,000 different species of viruses. The oceans alone may contain more viral particles than stars in the observable universe. The fact is, we live in a world of viruses-viruses that are unfathomably diverse, immeasurably abundant. This scenario is more equivocal than you think. And of course the nefarious SARS-CoV-2 virus, cause of COVID-19 and so bewilderingly variable in its effects, so tricky, so dangerous, so very transmissible, is gone. The SARS virus of 2003, the alarm that we now know signalled the modern pandemic era, gone. Variola, the agent of smallpox? That virus was eradicated in the wild by 1977, but now it vanishes from the high-security freezers where the last spooky samples are stored. Nobody suffers anymore from chicken pox, hepatitis, shingles, or even the common cold. Herpes B, carried by some monkeys, often fatal when passed to humans, gone. All the rotaviruses, gone, a great mercy to children in developing countries who die by the hundreds of thousands each year. Nipah and Hendra and Machupo and Sin Nombre are gone-never mind their records of ugly mayhem. HIV is gone, and so the AIDS catastrophe never happened. Vast reductions of human misery and death. The measles virus, the mumps virus, and the various influenzas are gone. The gruesomely lethal Ebola virus is gone. Let’s imagine planet Earth without viruses. This story appears in the February 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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