Our worst fears confirmed: Covid-over-IP!

Yesterday, March 31, an extraordinary news conference was held in Washington, DC. It was a joint effort by the CDC and CISA, marking the first time they have addressed a single threat together. During the conference, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and CISA Director Jen Easterly told an amazed audience of reporters that a previously unthinkable event had occurred: A new Covid-19 variant has appeared in a completely virtual form. That’s right, Covid can now spread over IP!

As Dr. Walensky recounted it, the CDC started getting scattered reports in January that multiple people who had participated in the same videoconference a few days earlier had all come down with Covid-19 on the same day – even though none of them had never been in the physical presence of any of the others in the group. Dr. Walensky said her first reaction when hearing this story was “So what? How could that be anything more than a strange coincidence?” Given that the omicron variant was now spreading very rapidly in the US, it was possible that almost any random collection of people might all develop Covid on the same day.

However, the frequency of these reports seemed to be increasing, so both agencies decided an investigation was needed. A little inquiry led them to the world’s leading expert on disease spread between the physical and cyber realms, Dr. Justin Case. Dr. Case is Chair of the Department of Cyber Epidemiology of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, ND (Extension Division). He holds the same position at the University of Northern South Dakota at Wanton, SD (ED). Dr. Case, who participated in the conference virtually from Hoople, took up the narrative from there.

“Let me say to begin with that a physical disease crossing into the cyber realm isn’t a new phenomenon. After all, we’re all spending more and more of our lives online (especially during the pandemic) and it’s becoming harder and harder to separate our physical and virtual existences. As we all know, the novel coronavirus is constantly mutating. Each of those mutations can be thought of as a new business venture: the virus takes a new form in the hope that this new form will open up a new ‘market’ for it.

“You may know that Covid-19 has spread to other species before, like minks and deer; these were clearly new markets that paid off for the virus. When you consider that, it shouldn’t be hard to understand that the virus might want to test the virtual market, especially since people with Covid – like just about everyone else on the planet – spend increasing amounts of time in front of a computer or smartphone screen. In fact, it was just about inevitable that, at some point, the virus would figure out how it could get to those fresh-faced, ripe targets that seemed to be inches away from its current host, right behind the computer screen.

“We’re still trying to find Patient Zero – that is, the first person who contracted the new virtual Covid-19 variant. Normally, that’s not too hard to do, since as you go back in time the cases are confined to a smaller and smaller geographic area. However, when you’re dealing with a disease that’s crossed into the virtual realm, that’s a lot harder. You can’t rely on physical proximity as the critical factor anymore; you have to find its cyber equivalent.

“We first looked at domain names, on the idea that the people using the same “home” internet domain would be more likely to spread Covid-over-IP among themselves than people in different domains. This made sense, since most web conferences are conducted for business purposes, and often among employees of the same company. That is, they’ll all be joining the meeting from the same ‘companyxyz.com’ domain. That might be how the virus spreads among them.

“However, that hypothesis turned out to be wrong. We found too many examples of web conference participants contracting Covid-19 together, while using completely different domain names.

“At that point, we started focusing on IP addresses. Those are a lot harder to track, since most companies take great pains not to make the IP addresses of their internal network visible on the public internet. So we had to work with the IT staff of the company that employs each sick worker, to find out the IP address they were actually using during the web conference in question.

“To make a long story short, we’re now working from the hypothesis that two individuals who participate in the same videoconference from IP addresses that are numerically very close to each other are at much higher risk of spreading Covid-over-IP than two people who are using very different addresses. However, if it’s true that IP addresses are the key indicator of proximity, this means that Covid could spread through lots of different online activities.

“This means we need to be concerned about a lot more activities than just web conferences. We’ve examined the possibility of spreading Covid-19 through a number of online activities. We’ve identified four activities of concern.

“First, people who are unvaccinated, over 65, immunocompromised, or otherwise at higher-than-normal risk from Covid-19 are well advised not to use a computer at all. If that’s simply not possible, they should at least make sure they’re vaccinated and boosted, and that they wear a high-quality N95 or KN95 mask while online.

“Second, people participating in a videoconference should share their IP addresses in the chat session. If two people have close IP addresses, one of them would be well advised to exit the conference – or at least turn their camera off (there’s some evidence that Covid-over-IP spreads more easily to someone whose face appears onscreen than to someone who has their camera off, although we’re still investigating that).

“Third, you need to be careful about email. While this is even more preliminary, we have had more than a handful of reports in which a person seems to have spread Covid to someone that they sent an email to – and this can happen even if they’re using very dissimilar IP addresses.

“If you remember, in the early days of the pandemic, there was a lot of concern about Covid-19 spreading on surfaces (do you remember wiping down your groceries?). It seems virtual Covid-19 may do something similar with email: It attaches itself to the subject line of an email, so that when you open the email (or sometimes if you just move the mouse over it), the virus can immediately jump to you. I’ll admit this one is pretty speculative, so at the moment I’m certainly not suggesting that you stop reading email. But you might want to cut down on the number of emails you read (of course, never even open spam or phishing emails), and spend as little time as possible reading each email.”

“Lastly, you need to be careful who you friend on Facebook and other social media platforms. Before friending anybody, you should inquire about their vaccination status; if they’re not vaccinated and boosted you should request that they do this before you friend them. But as we know, being vaccinated doesn’t mean a social media friend can’t become infected. And because anyone might be asymptomatically infected, you need to be careful to limit your interactions with all of your online friends, not just ones who might not be vaccinated. Plus you should wear a mask whenever interacting on any social media, at least for the time being.

Dr. Case closed by saying that he is writing an article on Covid-over-IP, which will appear soon in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. The article will contain important advice on avoiding online Covid infections as well as on reweaving rugs, Dr. Case’s hobby.

Any opinions expressed in this blog post are strictly mine and are not necessarily shared by any of the clients of Tom Alrich LLC. If you would like to comment on what you have read here, I would love to hear from you. Please email me at tom@tomalrich.com.