Letter from the (un)seen virus: (post)humanist perspective in corona times

Abstract

Dear humans, you cannot see me with naked eyes,1 and yet you can no longer ignore my existence (Figure 1). My official title is long: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome‐Coronavirus‐2 (SARS‐CoV‐2). I am also known as nCoV, the 2019 Novel Coronavirus, or simply Corona. In early December 2019, I was making the usual rounds in a Wuhan food market in Hubei province in China. The market was thick with humans and nonhumans in proximity. I attached myself to a tiny droplet slipping inside ‘patient zero’, who sneezed, coughed, suffered from high temperature and breathing difficulty, and recovered after two weeks. ‘Patient zero’ thought I was an ordinary virus that caused the endemic, seasonal flu. It was not until I had multiplied in hundreds and thousands, and an unusually high number of pneumonia cases had been reported, that the global health authorities took notice (Heymann and Shindo 2020).