Murphy’s Law states that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. I never really believed in it. After all, so many things could have happened to cause humanity’s extinction but none occurred. Diseases break out and wars are declared but none of this destroyed our race. We consistently stand against anything that threaten us. And when the threat is major, we stand united, no matter our religion, or the color of our skin. Based on that, I never thought we could get ourselves in the current situation. Nature finally found a breach in our system. If Ebola or Zika couldn’t eradicate us, then it should find an alternative. One that divides us to win.  This story is mine, and how I lived the breakout of SH-02, the shrinking virus.

No one thought SH-01 was serious at first. Indeed, this version of the virus touched insects and animals in only rare occasions. For most people, it was only a myth. Some were seeing it as a bedtime story for crazy scientists. Others thought it was a military designed virus that escaped while tested. Nobody cared and medias only talked about it when a gorilla lost 9 inches at the San Diego Zoo. Talk shows laughed about it calling the monkey: “the shrinking gorilla”. How original of them.

I was only a freshman in college at that time, studying business in the Netherlands. Whatever it was, I was agreeing it was unimportant and far away from me. The only thing that was stressing me was my first trimester exams at the time. However, I remember perfectly the first time the phenomena started to scare me a bit. It was during the holiday season. I was back home, in France with my family. I turned on the news on a cold winter morning to see that two other monkeys had found themselves shrunk. This time their sizes had been reduced to a few inches high. I really started wondering what in the world could have shrunk a living being like that. I remembered my courses on viruses’ outbreak and their effect on economy: how Ebola evolved from touching bats, to monkeys, to humans. I wasn’t truly afraid, just stressed out. At the time, I thought that a virus that could shrink humans was rather funny, like everyone else.

In the following weeks, it became rather redundant to hear about chimpanzees shrinking. Their sizes were variable. Some only shrunk a few inches while other were measuring a 3 inches in the end. All around the world cases appeared. In the wild and in zoos. In Asia and Africa, more than 250 cases of shrinking animals were found. The populations were started to become curious about it. WHO was often communicating about it, always repeating that the virus was unable to affect human beings. However, it finally happened. At the beginning of Spring, the patient zero was found in South Korea. He had lost 3 feet in two days. But it wasn’t his size that was the scariest; it was how he got the disease. He wasn’t bitten or anything like that. A little monkey in a Zoo had only touched him while he visited Dubai. That’s it. This man had traveled to come back home and who knew how many people were already transporting the virus. This thing was already out there and human could be affected simply by being touched. This is when people got scared. When I got scared. When it was too late. When SH-01 became SH-02.