We Have Killed Nature, and Now Nature Is Killing Us

We live in completely unprecedented times.  A microscopic virus that cannot be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled, has brought the entirety of humanity to its knees.  It is as if the Angel of Death depicted in the Biblical book of Exodus has been unleashed upon the whole world.  And 21st Century man, with all of his advances in technology and abilities, is completely powerless against it.

But many people do not believe this.  They believe that we should have handled COVID-19 the same way we do with any flu.  These people believe that the lockdown, which has caused so much economic hardship, was completely unnecessary.

Those who make such arguments are showing their complete ignorance of the threat we are facing.

When I first wrote about the COVID-19 pandemic on March 25, the worldwide total was 461,929 confirmed cases and 20,852 deaths.  Now, approximately one month later, the worldwide total is 3,190,584 confirmed cases and 225,857 deaths.  The US totals are 1,049,431 confirmed cases and 60,640 confirmed deaths [source].  In just a few weeks, more Americans have died from COVID-19 than the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam war in 12 years.  And these numbers from COVID-19 have exploded despite the fact that we have basically been in a national lockdown.

The numbers are slowing down as I write this, and many states, against the advice of experts, are starting to open up their economies, allowing people to go back to work and generally back out into society.  People are demanding that the economy be opened up because they are afraid they will not be able to feed their families or keep a roof over their heads if this nationwide lockdown continues, and their fears are completely justified.  But is this the fault of the lockdown or the virus itself?

Many people, who know absolutely nothing about viruses or epidemics, are saying we should have never had a lockdown, that it would have been better if the virus had been able to run its course, giving us herd immunity as we have done with other viruses.  As Donald Trump told us, 25,000 to 60,000 people die every year from the flu.  Why are we treating this one so differently?

Jeremy Samuel Faust, M.D., M.S., M.A., FACEP, who practices emergency medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital and is an instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote a fascinating opinion piece regarding flu deaths at ScientificAmerican.com entitled, "Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges".

Dr. Faust writes that arguments comparing COVID-19 deaths to a bad year of the flu "are based on a flawed understanding of how flu deaths are counted, which may leave us with a distorted view of how coronavirus compares with it."

Dr. Faust wrote that:

[I]n four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.

He continued:

Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy? 

I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

What could he possibly mean by this statement?  Have we been lied to?

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which [is] far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.  [emphasis mine]

The CDC website confirms Dr. Faust's statement that stated flu deaths are estimates. The CDC writes about it in an article entitled, "How CDC Estimates the Burden of Seasonal Influenza in the U.S."

CDC uses a mathematical model to estimate the numbers of influenza illnesses, medical visits, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States, as well as, the impact of influenza vaccination on these numbers. The methods used to calculate the burden of influenza have been described previously. More recently, the same model was adopted to estimate influenza-associated deaths in the United States. This methodology has been used to retroactively calculate influenza burden, including deaths, going back to 2010.

So why in the world would the CDC report up to 60,00 deaths when there might be as little as 3400 deaths?  This is their explanation:

Seasonal influenza may lead to death from other causes, such as pneumonia, congestive heart failure, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It has been recognized for many years that influenza is underreported on death certificates.

Back to Dr. Faust's article, as he continues:

There is some logic behind the CDC’s methods. There are, of course, some flu deaths that are missed, because not everyone who contracts the flu gets a flu test. But there are little data to support the CDC’s assumption that the number of people who die of flu each year is on average six times greater than the number of flu deaths that are actually confirmed. In fact, in the fine print, the CDC’s flu numbers also include pneumonia deaths.

Dr. Faust then goes on to call for a change in the method used by the CDC to count flu deaths.  As he writes,

CDC’s reporting about flu deaths is dangerously misleading the public and even public officials about the comparison between these two viruses. If we incorrectly conclude that COVID-19 is “just another flu,” we may retreat from strategies that appear to be working in minimizing the speed of spread of the virus.

The numbers we are currently seeing for COVID-19 are not estimates.  They are the actual infections and deaths reported throughout the US and the rest of the world.  The real numbers are undoubtedly much higher than those reported.

As Dr. Faust says, since we do not have an actual count of deaths from the seasonal flu, it is impossible to compare it to COVID-19:

To do this, we have to compare counted deaths to counted deaths, not counted deaths to wildly inflated statistical estimates. If we compare, for instance, the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the second full week of April to the number of people who died from influenza during the worst week of the past seven flu seasons (as reported to the CDC), we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu. In other words, the coronavirus is not anything like the flu: It is much, much worse.

Well, that certainly shoots down the arguments we hear from those who say COVID-19 is just another flu.  They are looking at two diseases which appear very similar and produce many of the same symptoms, but in reality have little to nothing in common.

We are also being warned by experts that opening up too soon could cause a second wave that will be worse than the first wave we just experienced.  We are already seeing this in countries like Singapore, Germany and Japan. From an article dated April 24, 2020 entitled, "This Japanese Island Lifted Its Coronavirus Lockdown Too Soon and Became a Warning to the World":

Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido offers a grim lesson in the next phase of the battle against COVID-19. It acted quickly and contained an early outbreak of the coronavirus with a 3-week lockdown. But, when the governor lifted restrictions, a second wave of infections hit even harder. Twenty-six days later, the island was forced back into lockdown.

Hokkaido's first infection was discovered shortly after its annual snow festival started on January 31, the first patient being a woman from Wuhan, China.  It soon started circulating around the population.  66 people were diagnosed in the next month, the highest in Japan, and the governor declared a state of emergency.  Schools, businesses and restaurants voluntarily shut down.  By mid March, things had stabilized, daily new cases being in single digits and sometimes zero.

But the main industries of Hokkaido - tourism and agriculture - were devestated.  Restrictions were eased on March 18, which came right before a 3-day weekend.  People poured out into the streets and cafes, and likely kicked off a second wave.  People from other lockdown areas traveled to Hokkaido, adding to more infections.

By April 9, exactly 3 weeks after the restrictions were eased, there was a record outbreak - 18 in one day.

On April 14, Hokkaido was forced to announce a state of emergency for a second time. The island had 279 reported cases, an increase of about 80% from when the governor lifted the first lockdown less than a month before. As of Wednesday, there were 495 cases in Hokkaido. 

Businesses are now preparing for the long haul. Tetsuya Fujiawara, CEO of Smile Sol, a group of ten pub restaurants in Hokkaido, says even though sales are down 60%, he’d rather a strong, consistent lockdown than “lukewarm measures” that would only perpetuate the cycle of restrictions being lifted and then reinstated as infections resurge.

The article ends with this:

As for Nagase, the doctor involved in Hokkaido’s response, the hard lesson he and the prefecture have learned, he says, is that until there’s a vaccine or medicine, everyone has to take personal responsibility and understand that, “it really may not be until next year that we can safely lift these lockdowns.”

Why is this happening?  Where did this virus come from?  And why are we now being warned to expect more of these pandemics with even deadlier consequences?

From an article dated 4/14/20 entitled, "COVID-19 and nature are linked. So should be the recovery":

Intact nature provides a buffer between humans and disease, and emerging diseases are often the results of encroachment into natural ecosystems and changes in human activity. In the Amazon, for example, deforestation increases the rates of malaria, since deforested land is the ideal habitat for mosquitoes. Deforested land has also been linked to outbreaks of Ebola and Lyme disease, as humans come into contact with previously untouched wildlife.

A study published this year found that deforestation in Uganda was increasing the emergence of animal-to-human diseases and stresses that human behaviour is the underlying cause. Altering nature too much or in the wrong way, therefore, can have devastating human implications.

While the origin of the COVID-19 virus is yet to be established, 60% of infectious diseases originate from animals, and 70% of emerging infectious diseases originate from wildlife. AIDS, for example, came from chimpanzees, and SARS is thought to have been transmitted from an animal still unknown to this day. We have lost 60% of all wildlife in the last 50 years, while the number of new infectious diseases has quadrupled in the last 60 years. It is no coincidence that the destruction of ecosystems has coincided with a sharp increase in such diseases.

Natural habitats are being reduced, causing species to live in closer quarters than ever to one another and to humans. As some people opt to invade forests and wild landscapes due to business interests and others at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum are forced to search for resources for survival, we damage the ecosystems, risking that viruses from animals find new hosts – us.

Given our interconnected and ever-changing world, with air travel, wildlife marketing and a changing climate, the potential for further serious outbreaks remains significant. Pandemics are, therefore, often a hidden side effect of economic development and inequalities that can no longer be ignored. In other words, just as carbon is not the cause of climate change, it is human activity - not nature - that causes many pandemics.

God created the world in perfect balance.  Everything had a place, and when He created it, everything was in its place.  God created the world to produce life, and it did so abundantly.

And when God placed man on the earth, He told us to have dominion over everything (Gen 1:26).  But to have "dominion" does not mean we have the right to use it in any way we want.  God gave us a perfect earth and expected us to keep it that way.

But when sin entered the world, man stopped following God's way.  Greed became the driving force.  People saw and took what they wanted, no matter the cost to others or to the earth.

Until the Industrial Revolution, the damage to the earth remain somewhat localized. We lived mostly in harmony with nature and just did not have the means to destroy the earth on a massive scale.  But with the Industrial Revolution, everything changed.

Technology exploded, and we started seeing nature more and more as an enemy that had to be conquered.  We mowed down entire forests, killed whole species of animals, poisoned our waters.  And since WWII, the pace of destruction has been breathtaking.  As the article above states, we have lost 60% of our wildlife.  Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2016 State of the Forests report revealed that 7 million hectares of forest are lost annually while agricultural land expands by 6 million. We are throwing so much plastic into our waters that it is estimated that by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world's oceans.

We are killing our world.  We are on the edge of the cliff and ready to fall over at any time.  Our sins against humanity and nature are catching up to us, and we have no defense.

COVID-19 and all of the other epidemics that we have seen and will see are not acts of God.  They are not punishments from God.  They are the result of our greed.  All of the destruction of nature, all of the wars, all of our sins against humanity come down to one thing:  love of money.  People will do anything for money.  There is one verse in the Bible that explains it all:

The love of money is the root of all evil.  I Timothy 6:10

Unless we recognize and repent of our sins, I see no hope for humanity.  I am not one who is into prophecy and predicting the end of the world - Our Lord said no one knows the time - but it doesn't take a genius to look around and see that our entire planet is in big trouble.

I believe God withheld the "wonders of technology" from man until these times.  But now He is allowing us to experience the full effect of our sins. The world we knew before COVID-19 is gone.  We are entering into a new era.  Nothing will ever be the same.

Pope Francis has been warning us during his entire pontificate.  Here is a portion of his message from Earth Day 2020:

We are fashioned from the earth, and fruit of the earth sustains our life. But, as the book of Genesis reminds us, we are not simply “earthly”; we also bear within us the breath of life that comes from God (cf. Gen 2:4-7). Thus we live in this common home as one human family in biodiversity with God’s other creatures. As imago Dei, in God’s image, we are called to have care and respect for all creatures, and to offer love and compassion to our brothers and sisters, especially the most vulnerable among us, in imitation of God’s love for us, manifested in his Son Jesus, who became man in order to share our state with us and save us. 

Because of our selfishness we have failed in our responsibility to be guardians and stewards of the earth. “We need only take a frank look at the facts to see that our common home is falling into serious disrepair” (Laudato Si’, , 61). We have polluted it, we have despoiled it, endangering our very lives. For this reason, various international and local movements have sprung up in order to appeal to our consciences. I deeply appreciate these initiatives; still it will be necessary for our children to take to the streets to teach us the obvious: we have no future if we destroy the very environment that sustains us. 

We have failed to care for the earth, our garden-home; we have failed to care for our brothers and sisters. We have sinned against the earth, against our neighbours, and ultimately against the Creator, the benevolent Father who provides for everyone, and desires us to live in communion and flourish together. And how does the earth react? There is a Spanish saying that is very clear about this. It goes: “God always forgives; we humans sometimes forgive, and sometimes not; the earth never forgives”. The earth does not forgive: if we have despoiled the earth, its response will be very ugly. 

How can we restore a harmonious relationship with the earth and with the rest of humanity? A harmonious relationship... We so often lose sight of harmony: harmony is a work of the Holy Spirit. In our common home too, on the earth, and in our relationships with people, with our neighbour, with the poorest, how can we restore this harmony? We need a new way of looking at our common home. For this is not a storehouse of resources for us to exploit. For us believers, the natural world is the “Gospel of Creation”: it expresses God’s creative power in fashioning human life and bringing the world and all it contains into existence, in order to sustain humanity. As the biblical account of creation concludes: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen 1:31). When we see these natural tragedies that are the earth’s response to our mistreatment, I think: “If I ask the Lord now what he thinks about it, I do not believe he is saying it is a very good thing”. It is we who have ruined the Lord’s work! 

In today’s celebration of Earth Day, we are called to renew our sense of sacred respect for the earth, for it is not just our home but also God’s home. This should make us all the more aware that we stand on holy ground! 

Dear brothers and sisters, “let us awaken our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense” (Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Querida Amazonia, 56). The prophetic gift of contemplation is something that we can learn especially from indigenous peoples. They teach us that we cannot heal the earth unless we love and respect it. They have the wisdom of “living well”, not in the sense of having a good time, no, but of living in harmony with the earth. They call this harmony “living well”. 

We are seeing the destruction and collapse of the world as we know it.  If we do not immediately heed the warning signs, we will see the complete destruction of our precious planet.  It must be today.   Tomorrow will be too late.