Goats and Soda Primer on the Coronaviru Variants: Illustrated

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Health, Medicine, Biological Diversity, Society

Ed Hessler

Michaleleen Doucheff who reports for NPR's Goats and Soda includes an illustrated guide about Coronavirus Variants. It is based on Legos, a convenient gadget for showing how the virus literally shakes hands with a cell, one secret enough that the cell considers all is well and "We can let this guy inside." Mistake #1 but once made the course is set. From such a simple beginning we now have a global pandemic (discounting the botched response of many nations, including the United States and we can't do that. There is more to this disease than biology and biomedicine; there is also biopolitics.).

She writes about the tactics the virus uses to "evade the immune system." But antibodies have their methods too to help take down the virus. So there is this continuous dance between the virus and the immune system.

There is some hope and fear here but it is a nice primer on a complicated subject.