Santa Cruz is a quirky combination of California throwbacks like twentieth century cars and diners, surf culture, healthy eating and exercise, California tech, and pseudoscience, with an across-the-board sprinkling of amateur musicians, most wielding ukuleles at least some of the time. It’s a credulous group, and I am daily subjected to a barrage of theories about SARS-CoV-2, which is either a byproduct of the rollout of 5G, a bioweapon designed and deployed by a foreign power, an Ivy League lab invention sold to a hospital in Wuhan, or some combination thereof.

Since this is the third zoonotic coronavirus causing a respiratory syndrome to afflict humans this century, and since other viruses, including some coronaviruses, have assailed us at various levels since we emerged from the soup, I am not sure why it is necessary to  have a special origin story for this one. SARS-CoV (the First) was less easily transmitted so didn’t spread as fast, which is good since the fatality rate was 9.5%. It has an R0 of 3.

MERS-CoV was the super scary one, with a fatality rate of closer to 30%, but transmission was much gnarlier, so it didn’t get as far. Viruses mutate constantly, and RNA-based viruses mutate millions of times faster than their hosts, so whether they get the Golden Ticket of crossing over to Homo sapiens is a random event.

SARS-CoV-2 hit the jackpot, crossing over to the Big Target of Humanity with an estimated R0 of 5.7, and now we are where we are. It’s bad, but it could be worse. If you’re bored at home, read Station Eleven, or watch the reboot of Planet of the Apes. We’re not there yet.

Or you might consider Avatar, a movie in which the planetary plague is an alien species that threatens the planet’s entire ecosystem and all of its lifeforms. Its conceptual leap has a very Santa Cruzan feel: the entire planet is connected to a mother goddess, Eywa, though a neural net to which individuals creatures attach by various appendages. Ultimately, the lifeforms of the planet, incited by Eywa, join forces to successfully expel the aliens, many of whom are killed. The survivors must return to their own planet, a planet they have exploited to the point of ruin, planet Earth.

I can imagine the satisfaction of believing that Earth has created a virus to either destroy us or at least cull us enough to slow our headlong destruction of it. Why isn’t this origin story making the rounds?