COVID-19: Will it be minor, recurring or a pandemic?

Humans were defenseless, cut down like wheat by the weapons of the Martian invaders.

But just when humankind seemed doomed in H.G. Wells' 1898 novel, "War of the Worlds," the Martians suddenly died. The invaders were killed by David-vs.-Goliath earthlings so small that they were invisible, an army of viruses humans regard as nuisances because they cause the common cold.

The common cold is caused by 200 different viruses, each of which can elicit cold symptoms such as slight fever, sneezing, coughing and more that are our body's ways of fighting viral infection. During the coldest part of winter, colds are often triggered by coronaviruses, which typically cause 15 to 20 percent of the million or more colds Americans catch each year.

A novel single-stranded RNA coronavirus was first identified in China in December 2019 and officially named after SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) that it was first thought to resemble: SARS-CoV-2, called COVID-19.

This disease, which has already potentially infected more than 400,000 people on six continents, in 81 percent of victims initially produces relatively mild common cold symptoms like other coronaviruses. But in the elderly or health-compromised, it caused severe respiratory problems and at least 2,800 deaths.

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It is also an economic and political disease, creating fear of infection that is closing factories, destroying tourism and turning shopping areas into ghost towns worldwide. This has devastated China's economy and threatened the European Union – which refuses to check the health of travelers crossing its national borders – with deep recession or depression.

The United States, where President Donald Trump wisely clamped down on air travel from China as soon as he learned of the disease, has very few cases and no deaths as of this writing. But Democrats, fearful of losing the November elections, have rushed to irrationally blame him for the disease. "Let's call it Trumpvirus," writes radical leftist Gail Collins in the New York Times.

Democrats are weaponizing this disease, and quietly cheering the 3,000-point correction loss it caused to stocks, to weaken Mr. Trump's reelection prospects. Democrats have put America in peril by letting millions of illegals – many carrying severe diseases – into the country and helping them hide in sanctuary cities as a health threat to us all.

Collectivist, conformist societies like Red China spread such diseases, but diverse, individualist nations with strong borders are difficult to infect. Think of the monoculture of one vulnerable type of potato that caused the Irish potato famine. Socialism is a monoculture.

This coronavirus may in the long run become a minor nuisance like the common cold, or a recurring malady like influenza (that kills up to 69,000 Americans each year), or a severe pandemic disease.

The common cold becomes less common in old age, because when you catch, say, an Adenovirus Number 5 cold, you acquire a lifelong measure of immunity to that specific virus. By age 70, the average person catching three colds per year has suffered most of the 200-odd virus colds and has a reduced likelihood of catching these individual diseases in virulent form again.

You can catch influenza again, however, because it jumps among species and mutates. Doctors say you need a new flu vaccine each year.

Oddly, COVID-19 also mutates, and both Chinese and Japanese researchers have found that up to 14 percent of those who recover from it can immediately be re-infected, unlike with most common cold viruses.

The South China Morning Post reports that researchers at Nankai University in Tianjin find COVID-19 "has an HIV-like mutation that means its ability to bind with human cells could be up to 1,000 times as strong as the SARS virus." Like the AIDS virus and terrifyingly lethal Ebola virus, it appears to target an enzyme called furin, a protein activator.

Where did this strange virus come from? Wild animals, says China's government, but they blame a Wuhan animal meat market only about 900 feet away from China's biggest Level-4 bioweapons laboratory where such new diseases can be created by recombining DNA.

If scientists invented a vaccine that transformed you into that 3-6 percent of humans who rarely catch colds, would you take it? Three decades ago, my investigation in Reader's Digest found that epidemiologist Kurt S. Zanker at the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany had studied those who get less than one cold per year and calculated that they are SIX TIMES more likely to develop cancerous tumors.

When you have a cold or flu, your immune system attacks and destroys cells undergoing malignant transformation, either by virus or cancer. Colds trigger a "spring housecleaning" of invading cancer that might not happen if you catch few colds. In today's war of the world, this virus that now seems like doom might become a blessing.

Lowell Ponte is a former Reader's Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, "China's Top Secret War," shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings against the little-known economic threats the People's Republic of China poses. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.