COVID-19 Chapter 18: Conservation & Pandemics

stress and trauma on a daily basis. I witness pain and suffering of both animals and their owners, and I am often holding animals as they take those hard final breaths. It's not all puppies and kittens. Clients are stressed and anxious, and they often take it out on the staff. Throughout COVID, we have implemented a client free policy and only allow patients into and out of the building. While this helps keep us safe, it also poses a bunch of logistical obstacles.

We went from normal practice to a brand new way of operation we have never had to do before. Overnight. We split our staff into two teams and spent the next nine months working short staffed. Clients were angry they could no longer come inside with their beloved pets and many thought we were over exaggerating this COVID thing. I personally was working one month on overnights and one month off overnights for months on end, and I was exhausted. Oftentimes I was on my own and having to deal

with an angry client as well as sick patients. Veterinary medicine is hard even in the best of times. Veterinary medical professionals are three times more likely to commit suicide than the average person. Many of us are on anti anxiety or depression medication, I being one of them, and work eleven plus hour days with little to no breaks even to go to the bathroom. COVID has only made things worse. Along with the pressures that COVID has placed on our profession, there is often a lot of moral

pressure as well. When clients have low funds, they expect us to do things for free. If we don't, we're seen as monsters who are in it for the money, because aren't we supposed to be helping sick animals. Anyone who works in vet med will tell you that nobody goes into this profession for the money. While we get into this work because we love it, we also have

bills to pay and families to support. Especially here, Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada to live in, with the average one bedroom apartment costing two thousand dollars a month. During COVID we have been the busiest we've ever been. We've had to stop accepting new clients as we just don't have the capacity to take on anymore. For a while, we had an average weight of three months for a surgical procedure and two weeks for an appointment, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a

very long time in veterinary medicine. With the incredible upsurge impet adoptions while people work from home due to COVID, emergency and general practices alike were overwhelmed in veterinary medicine. We are all worried about what will happen once people

are back to work. We all expect animal abandonment to skyrocket as people realize that they're now nine month old German shepherd cross has horrible separation anxiety because its owners we're home all the time, and now when they leave for work, it destroys their apartment and they can't handle it anymore.

Please be kind to your veterinary staff. We are all suffering, and I promise you we understand your frustration. We deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. And if you're a veterinary worker, I see you, I understand your struggle, and you're not alone. If you need help, please reach out to somebody. Thank you.

I've got to go with pregnancies that had to be taken to the COVID unit, or just sit in people's houses for an hour, just giving them the company they need and providing them a mental relief because they couldn't leave the house. I've been called to so many elderly people just so they could have a social interaction, or I've taken elderly people to a mental ward just so they could have the help they need. When the vaccine came,

I was actually very happy, thankfully. I got my first vaccine dose at the end of December last year when they just started coming out. I am happy that the vaccines are out, and I am happy that my family took it, and I am happy that I'm managed to get friends to take the vaccine. I would love to see situation and ambulances and go back to normal and people actually having social interactions because I've seen the mental

and physical devastation that it causes. People dying due to heart issues that could have been easily solved if they've just gone to the er with us, or people who just died of loneliness, which is something that should have been taken more care of.

In the UK, the government covered eighty percent of the furloughed wages, including my fiancee who works in the loading bay. My department cares for the plants, so obviously we couldn't be furloughed. We expected business to drop through the floor. It wasn't a walk in the park. But what we didn't expect was that the moment people were forced to stay indoors, they became desperate for plants to bring nature into their homes. Garden centers were closed, but supermarkets increased

their orders. My fiance was brought out a furlough after only three weeks and worked twelve hour days until we got our seasonal staff back in May. It was exhausting. Working during a national lockdown is strange. It's like going to work in the apocalypse. Then you go home with only enough energy to browse social media and no one has the same experience as you. Suddenly you have nothing

in common with longtime friends. The one time I tried to express this, I got shot down in flames for not just being grateful that I still have a job, which I am. Maybe I should add here that I'm being referred to a chronic fatigue clinic. So I may have struggled more than others, but we were all exhausted. Now we're in the second lockdown. Our wedding got canceled just fifteen days before the date, but we scheduled for March.

Now we can't get ppe suits for spraying, so we may lose crops soon, on top of losing the Wales in Scotland markets because they're lockdown. Horticulture has been previously treated like a poor cousin. Our general manager's daughter was told that she was too intelligent to go into horticulture. For the record, by training, I'm a horticultural research scientist.

I have a research master's. Maybe now we'll be less overlooked by schools and colleges as viable careers we're hiring and any field you might be interested in, from the grunt work through to logistics, through to science, it all has its place. More than that, I hope people remember just how much they needed nature during this time.

led to the spillover in this pandemic? Can you kind of walk us through the timeline of those early days.

So basically what you have in the last weeks of December twenty nineteen, you know, there was a recognition of a severe respiratory disease which we now know is COVID nineteen and I was sort of noted by Chinese health workers in the city of Wuhan, and within a few few weeks, by the time January, already the causative agent had been identified and the sequence of which was also made publicly available, which is really an extraordinarily short time.

So basically, at the end of December, something news turning up. It doesn't it doesn't look like fluid influenza tests and negative, Sarus seems to be negative, and then by the tenth of January you already have a sequence for what we

now know is the SARS coronavirus. Too. By looking back now at the data that the collated, for example in this WHO report, it seems very very unlikely that there was any significant circulation of this virus or at least clinical disease clinically apparent disease before November October November, there's really no data looking at mortality events or looking at clinical respiratory disease outbreaks in the city of Wuhan in May in the associated province, but you do you see

very clearly from the data from the National Notifiable Disease Reporting System in China that by the end of December, the virus plus the clinical disease was definitely circulating the community within the city of Huhan, initially in the central districts and then started to spread around these outside the central districts, and then with about two weeks time delay start seeing the increase immortality and clinical events also in the province of Rubai. So the other thing that's quite

interesting that we now have summary data. As you remember, back in January February, there was this very very strong signal from the Huanan seafood wholesale market. The key was

that this market was selling live wildlife species. So there was seen, as in previous outbreaks like SARS, that it may be a strong link he and initially many of the cases were directly linked to that market, and then as the weeks went on, there were more and more reports well some of the cases are not linked to this market, and there was a lot of questions around what was the role of the market, if at all. What we see now though, is that in these early

days people also had contacts. Some people also contact to other markets. And I find it particularly compelling that there are thirteen sequences available of saras COVID two with an onset in December, and of those thirteen, all of them had contact to a market. I think eleven of them had a contact with the jhure Non market, and then the able two to other markets. So that's a really

strong signal. And we also know now from some nine hundred plus environmental samples that most of the positive samples came from this western part of the market where the wildlife was housed and traded. But we still do not know at this point in time how the spillover event actually happened. With the timing is pretty good, but what happened. Was there an intermediary species, was it the traders, Was it humans that brought the virus into the city, into

the market. That's still pretty unclear at the moment. I think the two main hypothesis at the moment from the

ancestral host, which is in a horseshoe bad species. And as I'm sure you've discussed previously, this virus either spilled over directly into humans with cryptic evolution, for example, in a rural area and no one noticed, and then was brought to the market where there was an amplification event, or the more likely theory, and that's the one being favored at the moment, is that it's spilled over into an intermediary host and there's a lot of those available,

and then at the trading site or longer trade value chain, it came to a spiller rint to humans.

this measure. That's sort of one aspect. I think that general aspect from science and researchers that we would need to make more efforts to translate our science findings beyond publishing it in the highest impact journal that we can find. Just having a disease x buried somewhere in some report is obviously inadequate. In this case, this is compounded by the fact I would say that humans in general, or societies,

humans and societies basically are always discounting the future. We're obviously always taken by some short terms and immediate gains, and investing into the future, into the next generations, especially for events which have a low probability of happening, is something we we we always discount. So that is definitely sort of a foundational problem, and we need to get

over that if we want to move forward. I mean, this is a this is a viral spill over we're talking about now, But climate change, you know, it's on the heels, so to say, I think it's here now. Plus the problem is growing every moment, and we're also discounting those effects at the moment. We still think we're going to get over it somehow. So I believe that, you know, the lack of investment, the lack of understanding of long term investments with low immediate returns of investment.

I think, as I said, that's a real problem as well. But the other one is one thing we all underestimated, I'm sure, and I use this sort of a royal we all is the impacts, the broad and wide impacts that a single event is going to have on a global scale. Who would have thought that we would not have enough ppe gloves needles as a prevention measure on a global scale. And who would have known that six months later, eight months later, you still can't get spare

parts for multiple products. The interconnectness of the world I think was sorely under matd. So the obvious one was that the virus was able to spread super, super quickly across the entire globe, but also the interconnectness of our economic interdependency I think was something we really underestimated.

If we reflect based on a maybe ten thousand meter view, then one of the things that the pandemic has really done, and I think this is One of the great opportunities that we have moving forwards is the pandemic has at a great cost, of course, but has humanized the fact that destruction of our planet, destruction of our environment impacts

each and every one of us. Basically, it has made it real that destruction of a habitat halfway across the globe is going to kill potentially kill my neighbor in the bronx, and that is something we've never had before. I think each and every person I meet at least has some inkling that events on the other side of the globe, in the environment have potential to harm each and every one of us, impact our well being, our economic security, and in the end our lives. Yeah.

Are there ways in which we've made scientific progress that might have changed the pandemic, either for the worse or for the better. But in any case, how do you think it might have played out differently than it could have, let's say, twenty years ago.

to spread very very quickly. There was obviously, you know, bad luck around the New year as well, there was going to be more people traveling anyway, all that to be said, it's just there are so many more people traveling.

So I think that's that's the biggest difference. On the flip side, of course, if you remember that, I think we were a year and a half into SARS before we knew what the virus was, and certainly it took a long time to even establish that it had a source in wildlife, and that now as I said, you know, it was only three weeks probably after the official recognition of the severe respiratory to zee, that we had a full sequence, had a phylogenetic tree that showed that the

sequence was very close to BAT sequences and so on. So that's changed a lot, interestingly from the therapeutic side, And while that is certainly not my expertise, there's not that much new at least is what I can see from the literature. You know, the mainstay, a good old veterinary drug that we use widely for respiratory disease when it gets dire dexa metasone is still you know, it was a mainstay halfway through this pandemic. And then, as I pointed out before, of course what's new as well

is that we have a vaccine in one year. Remember the SARS vaccine development basically petered out after you know, a decade of no cases of SARS. So I think that's sort of my take of what would have been different.

coal markets that sell and trade in wildlife. These type of markets have been implicated not just in this pandemic, but like you said, in other large epidemics before this, and so they've kind of gotten a lot of press, which has led to some controversies, with some people saying we should ban the wildlife trade, ban hunting on wildlife completely, and other people pushing back and saying, well, these are sources of protein for people who need it for nutrition, et cetera.

First of all, the wildlife is often sold alive, which, as you can imagine, when you sell in a large, industrial sized market where you will have hundreds of species potentially mixing with the consumers, but also with domestic livestock and poultry, these are provides a really dynamic and very very dangerous interface for virus exchange, so that's quite special. Though in Southeast Asia and China, the animals are alive across all of China. There is no subsistence hunting anymore.

The wildlife is produced for a middle class and up and coming middle class as a luxury item, as a status symbol. The wildlife is always more expensive. So it's estimated that wildlife you know, bamboo rats and the civets and so on, costs between two and five times as much as pork of the same volume, all the same weight, so it's definitely a luxury item. It doesn't meet any

dietary or nutritional needs. Now that is starkly contrasted to, for example, the use of wildlife meat in Central Africa, where there are millions of people who are absolutely dependent on having access to wildlife meat to meet there are simple nutritional needs and you know that's protein and also micronutrient needs. They need that access because there are absolutely no alternatives now the way these two markets, and you know, similar markets are in Latin America and other parts of

Asia as well. But taking these two is the extreme. As you're hunt out the forests in let's say Central Africa, part of that meat is being used in large cities where there is no longer a nutritional need. Some of it is being shipped across the globe to end up in markets in Asia. And so what you're doing with the commercial trade of wildlife for consumption is that you're actually depriving the people who need it the most, which is mostly indigenous peoples and local communities of that resource

which is so important to them. So the two are interconnected, and the bands on the curbing of wildlife for human consumption from our point of view, from the point of view of the wildlife conservation society, focuses very very strongly on the urban commercial wildlife markets, while at the same time recognizing and supporting indigenous peoples in local communities and their need and their right to access wildlife meet So it's not complicated, but it's very nuanced and it does

require a clear understanding of the dynamics in different contexts. Now, as I pointed out, the fact that the animals are alive is definitely the biggest risk. Once the animal has been killed, and smoked and processed in any way, the risk drops by orders of magnitude. Of course, once it's

been cooked, there's no worry there at all. But with the life wildlife trade you do have this issue that as the animal moves along the trade value chain from its side of capture or the farm where it's being produced, to the market or the kitchen in the restaurant, the prevalence or the positivity rate to a specific pathogen actually increases.

So we've been able to show that for field rats, for example, along the trade value chain in Vietnam, at the field site where it's captured or bred, it's only every fifth rat which would be positive for coronavirus. By the time he gets to the kitchen in the restaurant in an urban setting, every second one of those rights is coronavirus positive. And the sad thing is this has already been shown back in two thousand and four for civets.

Civets and farms in China had practically no amptibodies to SARS, but by the time they'd reached the market site, I think eighty percent of them were positive for SARS. So this concentration and amplification along the market value chain is something that's really really important to consider.

Seventy five percent of all emerging infectious disease have their origin wildlife, So it's about this contact, these interfaces between wildlife and their habitat and humans. And the more contact we allow or enable on these contact areas, the greater the chance that one of the spillover events is going to be successful. So you have a compartment that's wildlife in an intact habitat, a lot of different species, one hundred thousands of viruses which are being shared, and the

animals are not sick. They're just the reservoirs. It doesn't bother anyone. You put a road into that compartment, or you put a road alongside there, you're starting to DeForest and you're trying to bring out the logs right and the left of that road. You have created an interface with the formerly intact forest, and along that interface there's going to be incoursions. People will go into the forest,

they will hunt there. They need to go hunt. They'll be trapping animals, they're getting fire wood, and within a few hundred meters there will be repeated contacts with wildlife. They will return to the road and then they will try to sell surplus wildlife. That animal will then move down the road and can be consumed and used. And as you can imagine, that is a possibility for a spillover event to occur. Now, these spill over events are

happening all the time. Viruses are spilling over constantly. The point being now that for the most part they do not cause disease. They are not able to replicate in human cells, and they certainly aren't able to transmit from human to human. But the more opportunities you provide at these interphases, it's like a numbers games. The more opportunities you provide, the greater the chance that eventually one virus is going to make it across the multiple barriers that

stop that naturally. So these would be interphase. It's in forests and at the edges of growing industrial expansion where you have cattle pastures. Those are the classic interfaces. But then we as humans, of course, we're particularly good at this. So what we do is we'll go in the forest and catch animals from all over the globe and then bring them together in a room and a marketplace. So

we create these, you know, basically super interfaces. That is probably you know, one of the worst ideas if you want to prevent spill over is to bring animals that are never to get normally into one place alive and let them exchange viruses and then add in several thousand people a day into that environment. That's just from a you know, looking at it from a risk side of things,

that's just a very very bad idea. If you ask for a permit and you had a BSL four lab and you said, well, you know what I want to do. We want to get fifty species just kind of put them in there and they'll just let them poop and exchange blood and we'll see what comes out of it. And that's what we'd like to do. You never get a permit for it, but that's why you're basically doing

in a market. So it's interesting that we don't consider or not we have not considered those threats adequately in the past, and no one's obviously going to pay for them now.

of working across different sectors. We are looking at things like epidemics and pandemics.

is going to be more likely. So the first sort of say barrier against spillover and the next pandemic is recognizing when spillover does happen at a very very early stage, and even more importantly is of course preventing spillover to happen at all. So it is well known and has been documented in numerous studies that intact landscapes intact forests generally do not constitute such a threat as disturbed landscapes. Spillovers happen predominantly in disturbed landscapes, so on the edges

of these intact areas. So wcs's mainstay is protecting areas and the communities that rely on them. That's the mainstay of our work. But around the edges, of course, in these edges of destruction, that's where the land is being changed, and this is the areas where we would expect future

spill over events of importance to occur. And since we are already working there, we were able to sort of the eyes and boots on the ground in some of these areas where with our tools which we're using for conservation, they're easily adapted and have been adapted in these past, you know, past year to also pick up early indications of the spillover event, and that can now be prepared at you at frontline community health centers can be pared

with innovative technology to get very early in diagnosis of something awry, I think, and I'm saying that on purpose, because what you want to actually notice is that there's something going on here which we cannot diagnose, but it has potential to be dangerous. Basically, it really breaks down

to something very simple. When you have a febrile disease which is being transmitted in a community somewhere on the edge of a forest or a disturbed landscape, you want to be very attentive to that, so that part that pre pandemic pre spillover is really the mainstay as we move forwards, protecting landscapes, protecting our forests, protecting the environment in general, maintaining ecosystem function and biodiversity is probably one of the best investments we can make into the future

and repair that with frontline and diagnostics and information networks. One of the things we've learned about working across sectors. Our organization is just inherently transsectoral, and you know governments, you would think that all the administrations and different ministries are talking to each other, are constantly and coordinating, but

the reality is that's not happening. Most basic would be the agricultural sector is completely siloed from the public health sector, so spillover, for example, from wildlife to livestock and then onto humans would actually need to be addressed by different sectors. Interestingly enough, as an organization, we actually work already with both sectors, so we're often a great convener and a great place to share information and to make people aware

of how these different areas are interconnected. So as we talk about frontline diagnostics and early onset sort of diagnostics, We also need to make sure that that information is made available into the existing public health networks, and that is really a challenge at the moment we need to address as we move forward. We really need to find out how to streamline that information and how to use that information. It's not that simple.

of our governments and decision processes. We definitely if we want to address future pandemics and epidemics, we need what is called a one health approach, And so one health approach is an approach that does acknowledge that the health of humans, the health of animals, plants, and the environment are all entangled and interconnected, and by trying to only deal with one pillar, you will never be able to address these complex issues, as a pandemic has shown, so

a one health framing, this kind of framing is essential, and I am seeing that across the globe as governments and administrations and multilaterals are scrambling to see how they're going to be able to implement that. So there's a broad realization that this is necessary. That great thing. On the other hand, we do have a problem that we're obviously, I mean calling it a problem is really an understatement. We do have this issue that we're talking about unknowns.

As you will see in the media and in discussions, there's always this talk about zoonosis in the sense that the classic description we have an animal reservoir and pathogens

spill over, known pathogens spill over into humans. But what we're dealing with with these pandemics is what are actually just zoonotic origin potential pathogens they spill over and then they don't need that animal reservoir at all anymore because they've got into the best host there is out there with nearly eight billion humans, So these zoonotic origin is just a small point in time and then all subsequent evolution and spread happens in humans, and to recognize which

virus is going to become a pathogen of importance, it's a very very difficult process at the moment. So I always say, if we had described SARS coronavirus to mid twenty nineteen from one of the species we call in Southeast Asia, probably wouldn't even have published the paper. I mean, it wouldn't have surprised anyone to find something. It would have maybe been interesting because it was so closely related to SARS, but it would have just been another one.

So how do we characterize these discovered pathogens quickly enough or these potential pathogens quickly enough that they can actually inform policy and decision makers. So that's going to be a tricky discussion and process in the next you know, hopefully shorter them later, But that's something we definitely need

to work on. A lot of is own about sell entry and replication in human sales and transmission, But how do you process that information, which is often you know, basic research in labs so that it can actually inform policy and decisions. So I think that's one of the really big challenges moving forward. Yeah.

ailing planet. And I think the pandemic, because it has impacted the well being and the health each and every family across the globe, makes it more tangible that the planet is ailing. So I do believe that it's going to provide an opportunity for us to have a more respectful and humble approach to our planet.

of that same year. And it was December twenty nineteen when it was first noticed that a new to US unidentified virus was causing a febrile illness in Wuhan in China, and by January tenth that virus had been sequenced, which is like amazingly fast, still so fast, and today, we still don't know the exact sequence of events or the precise spillover event or events that took place that led to this new virus emergence, but we do know that the ancestral host of SARS Kobe two was likely a bat,

But we can't pinpoint yet whether this virus spilled directly over from bats into humans or whether there was an intermediate host involved, which is probably more likely because that

has been the case with other coronavirus epidemics. But one thing is certain, and that is that it's very likely that large scale wildlife markets where live wildlife are housed and sold, such as the seafood market in Muhan and others nearby, that these markets likely played an integral role in the emergence of this particular virus.

of other humans. Over the past year, we've also seen the impact of globalization in so many other ways, everything from not having enough ppe or testing equipment, or in terms of vaccine development, like we're still seeing supply chain difficulties, and even outside the realm of healthcare, we're seeing supply chain difficulties. Remember the toilet paper. This interconnectedness that we often underestimate has been impossible to ignore during this pandemic.

And while this interconnectedness is the exact thing that allows pandemics like COVID nineteen to flourish, it also has a flip side because it's the same global network that has led to scientific progress, allowing us to identify and sequence this virus, trace its origin, and develop tests within a

matter of weeks after its emergence. Despite how much havoc this pandemic has reaked, we have achieved a hecka a lot amazing new vaccine technologies have been tested, scaled up, and deployed all around the globe in record time.

really big challenge. It's theoretically possible that some one could have found or identified a very similar virus to SARS CoV two in its original host, but couldn't have predicted that it would then cause this pandemic.

to happen. This pandemic has I think led to a broad realization that this approach really is vital going forward. But like we said, even in an earlier learning point, getting all of these different sectors to talk to one another is still a challenge.

or even an epidemic. Viruses are constantly spilling over, but for the most part, they don't lead to epidemics or pandemics because they don't cause disease in humans, or if they do, they aren't transmissible from person to person. And it's not intact forest habitats that pose a threat, it's the edges. It's those disturbed habitats. The more that we increase the number of interfaces between wildlife, their habitats, and humans,

the more we're playing a numbers game. We're just increasing the chances that a spillover event can occur, and we're increasing the chances that it will be successful, as in resulting in an epidemic or pandemic. Keeping live animals in cages at large scale commercial wildlife markets is one example of a place where you're really increasing the numbers of potential contexts, and it's why urban wildlife markets pose such a great threat in terms of zoonotic disease than wildlife

that is consumed by local communities for subsistence. For example, conservation of our forests not only decreases the contact between humans and wildlife, it also preserves habitat for wildlife populations in areas where people actually depend on wildlife as a food source. Doctor Waltzer said that this pandemic is one just one of the symptoms of our ailing planet. Conservation has to be one of the treatments.