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

Abstract

Dear humans, you cannot see me with naked eyes, and yet you can no longer ignore my existence 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)