![]() Together, the team that coauthored this text visited one kind of popular destination-Buddhist temples in Thailand-where tourists are having close encounters of the viral kind. Broadly, we are interested in how tourism has influenced the speed and intensity of interactions between human bodies and other creatures in more-than-human worlds. Tourism is a largely overlooked market force that has transformed flows of capital, people, and viruses through regional and global networks. Responding to Liu’s call to study banal travel practices, we speculate about how tourism in Southeast Asia may have played a role in the emergence of the pandemic. This essay builds on the latest scientific studies of coronavirus ecology. ![]() This mutant swarm was largely beyond the purview of our collective awareness, even while different variants moved among animals and people. The latest findings now suggest that SARS-CoV has been circulating undetected for decades, if not centuries. 7 The pandemic coronavirus strain that people noticed in late 2019 was not radically different from earlier strains of SARS-CoV-it simply acquired a constellation of subtle mutations that enabled it to find new ways to exploit human bodies and our global systems of travel. ![]() Swarms contain a multiplicity of strains, which each have distinct properties, making them highly unpredictable. Viral species are best understood as mutant swarms-clouds of rapidly changing infectious agents. 6 Scientists named the new pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2, recognizing its kinship with SARS, even though the public and many doctors persisted in calling it Covid-19. 4 A recent scientific paper in Nature estimates that around “66,000 people are infected with SARS-related CoVs each year in Southeast Asia.” 5 While initial reports from Wuhan in 2019 suggested that scientists had found a “novel” coronavirus, the viral taxonomists who later classified the virus concluded that it was the same species as SARS-the respiratory virus that was first reported in 2003. Screenshot from Inhuman Kiss, a 2019 Thai supernatural horror film directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri.īlood samples collected long before the pandemic reveal that many people in Asia have been living with coronaviruses for years. It manifests itself as a woman with her internal organs hanging down from the neck, trailing below the head. Krasue is a nocturnal female spirit in Southeast Asian folklore. 3 What if Wuhan was not the starting point of the pandemic, but just the site of many super-spreader events that amplified processes of global circulation already underway? Did people who were involved in prosaic stories of global travel-tourists, business travelers, international exchange students-bring the virus to Wuhan and then further hasten its global spread? While some scientists still are pinning the blame on Wuhan’s live-animal markets, virologists who specialize on the ecology of animal-borne diseases are now studying the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic with a much wider lens. “This is contemporary global interchange at its most prosaic.” 2 Like most researchers at the time, Liu assumed that Wuhan was where the virus originated. “What all these stories have in common is how unremarkable they are,” wrote Liu in March 2020. The name “Wuhan” came from the city's historical origin from the conglomeration of Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang, which are collectively known as the “Three Towns of Wuhan” (武汉三镇).
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