I am alarmed at the reported vandalism, illegal camping, and overcrowding issues that are occurring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. People need to be social distancing at this time in order to flatten the curve. Even if you yourself do not show symptoms, you are endangering everybody else around you. It seems pretty selfish that people are taking this time intended for quarantining in their homes, but instead, using it as time to take a trip with family or friends. The article asserts, "Complicating those problems is that Interior Department officials are not inclined to close parks unless local health or government officials request it". This is also worrying, because I do not think that the aforementioned officials are completely understanding the severity of the situation. Local health and government officials must mandate that all parks temporarily close in order to slow down the spread of Corona Virus; if they do not, they are putting all employees and visitors at risk. Parks should follow the lead of Yosemite, Sequoia, and Rocky Mountain, and close, as many people are not working or in school right now and would love to visit a park at this time to get their kids out of the house and get their energy out. 

     Furthermore, parks are reporting short staffing issues, because employees fear catching COVID-19. This goes to show that employees are for the parks closing too. Spring breakers should not only be "discouraged" from visiting parks, but banned altogether. There is also a reported decline of park volunteers right now, further showing that the public does not want to spread the virus. Everything is closing in this current climate- schools, jobs, restaurants, stores, small businesses... parks need to follow the lead they are not an exception.

Okay, I have a question that folks may be able to answer or at least ponder.  As background, some people in mainland China, along with some people here in the United States, like to eat and even strongly advocate eating various forms of wildlife.  In China, the "wild" menu includes bats and rare African anteaters known as pangolins.  All eight species of pangolin are actually listed either vulnerable or fully endangered, which raises basic questions about the ethics of killing them for recreational "sport" eating; but, that's a different discussion.  The important point here is that the COVID-19 virus belongs to the group that causes SARS and MERS and these organisms are known for their ability to jump from species to species.

The most widespread current origin theory for the COVID-19 pandemic is that this virus was using bats as hosts, then seems to have jumped back and forth between pangolins and bats, before jumping to humans when some human decided to put either a bat or a pangolin on the table.  There are now reports that the virus can and does jump from humans to dogs and even that some of the cases in Hong Kong resulted when the virus reportedly jumped over to the airport security dogs in Hong Kong, which the dogs then reportedly spread back to human passengers over the course of their patrol duties.  A dog with a cold usually has a very wet and drippy nose.

Now, here's my question.  Is it possible that campers and hikers might unintentionally carry the virus into a protected natural area, NPS or USFS unit for example, and then pass the virus over to the wildlife there?  This could be done through campground trash or wastes, perhaps even salty urine residue, crumbs from a trail snack, the last dregs from a water bottle emptied at trail's end, or any one of many other transmission paths.  Is it possible that the virus could then jump from species to species to ultimately end up causing a widespread and longlasting issue for conservation and NPS management, another microscopic version of lake trout?

There is actually more basis for this question than most folks might think.  Today, one of the bigger issues in North American wildlife management is Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in deer and elk populations.  CWD is one of a group of diseases known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) that are not caused by a virus, but by a perversely twisted protein, known as a prion that is reproduced and spread in ways that are actually similar to the way a virus reproduces and spreads, except that a prion is almost impossible to destroy and stays dangerous in the environment for an incredibly long time.  We now know about CWD in deer and elk; "mad cow" disease, which is spread to cattle when ground sheep entrails are mixed into their feed as a cheap protein booster; variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), whihc occurs in humans who eat meat from animals infected with the prion; and kuru, which is common among cannibals who eat the nerve tissue of dead relatives and neighbors; but, as late as the turn of the twentieth century, the only form of CWD known was scrapie, a TSE common in domestic sheep and one of the most acrimonious questions in wildlife biology involves the rumored way in which scrapie in domestic sheep became CWD in wildlife.

There's been animosity between cattlemen and sheepherders since the Roman Era and the argument has continued into modern times.  In the 1940s, cattlemen opposed to to the presence of sheep on public grazing lands were pointing, whether with sincere or insincere intent, to scrapie in domestic sheep and warning of its possible spread to wildlife.  We now know that deer and elk, which are members of the broader goat family, and wild sheep are all susceptible to CWD, as scrapie is known when it occurs in these species; but, at that time, there was no known case of the prion jumping over to these wildlife species.  As the admittedly apocryphal story goes, a science team assigned to the USFS set out to assess the potential for scrapie transmission to wildlife by closely confining crapie afflicted sheep along with a collection of wild deer, in pens rumored to have been in Colorado.  After a number of months in which many of the scrapie afflicted sheep died, the deer appeared unaffected and were turned out, back into the wild.  Again according to the story, what the team neglected to consider was the long asymptomatic incubation period associated with the presence of the prion.  We now know, in hindsight, that  wildlife penned with scrapie afflicted sheep would indeed be infected with the prion, but that clear symptoms would not appear for a while.  If this story of a grotesquely ill-conceived species to species prion transmission experiment is true, the deer released would potentially have been the source of CWD in North American deer and elk, just something to consider as humans potentially infected with COVED-19 wander around our national parks.

Rumpel is spot on in this assessment. Bats and Pangolins are indeed most probably the host careers for COVID-19. My army base in Germany is currently on full lockdown because of COVID-19.  I recall in Leviticus 11 of the Old Testament or Torah that Yahweh forbid eating these types of animals. Hmmmm, I wonder if Yahweh knew some of these animals were carriers of these viruses and diseases. Beautiful animals with a purpose but not for human consumption.  Prairie Dogs carry the Plague and we don't eat them. Great observation Rumpel. Be well each and everyone. 

People who say "taxpayers pay your salary!" are the worst. you know who else pays taxes? the people who are doing the jobs that collect those paychecks. And they put the taxes right back into the system themselves. And they work to clean up the mess of narcissists who treat the workers like the workers aren't citizens, taxpayers and patriots themselves.