DAVID JONES: COVID-19, like climate change, will impact how we live in major ways

As I write this, looking out of my living room window in Asheboro at blossoming trees and the multiple species at the bird feeders it strikes me that while we humans are hunkered down as a result of COVID-19, wondering what the future will bring, the rest of nature is going about its 'business as usual.'

Does it ever cross our minds that our present predicament might have a close connection with the ways we interface with the natural world? Do we ever think about what changes the human species is driving that alter natural processes and will ultimately, like the COVID pandemic, impact the way we live in major ways?

It is becoming evident that the virus causing the present pandemic originated in Asian bats. Whether it "escaped" from a research laboratory or, more likely, directly infected humans in a market selling animals for food, the reality is that in recent years a number of normally animal-hosted viruses have mutated sufficiently to become human pathogens.

SARS, MERS, Ebola, Lassa Fever and many other relatively "new" human diseases originated mostly in wild animals and migrated to humans. The probability is that cross infection was and is driven partly through the many ways humans put stress-inducing pressure on animal populations and individuals.

Sometimes that might simply be through habitat destruction or, as in the case of COVID-19 and SARS (both are related coronaviruses), through the capture and sale of live animals in crowded "wet" markets often supplied by the worldwide illegal live animal trade.

Once the immediate needs of dealing with the pandemic have passed, we would do well to put a great deal more effort into understanding the biology of animal viruses and the conditions under which other such agents could impact us again in the same way.

Halting the wild animal trade and closing markets selling wild animals would also go a long way to preventing animal-human disease transmission, especially in the case of these new coronaviruses.

Will the fact that we were so unprepared for this situation, despite the well based scientific warnings of the potential for a pandemic, now make us more mindful of other human-induced environmental changes that could have a similar disruptive impact?

Before COVID, the key environmental concern that was finally gaining broader recognition was climate change and that is of course still with us.

One positive aspect of our present predicament is the hope that listening to sound scientifically-based advice might become a more popular notion and that more people, especially leaders at all levels, will look to science to help drive rational, longer term decision making about our futures.