Why is coronavirus represented with this image? All the ways graphics and science have made us see what's invisible

Throughout the entire course of the quarantine, media and newscasts represented the coronavirus with a now famous image: a gray globe, dotted with yellow with menacing twisted and red tips. But this image, although perhaps the most representative of the Covid-19, is not the closest to reality. It is in fact a graphic rendering created by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, two illustrators of the Center for Disease Control or CDC – the main public health institute of the United States. Of course, this iconic image is not the result of imagination: the two illustrators generated it from the graphic representations of proteins enclosed in the RCSB Protein Data Bank, a free access database that collects graphical renderings different protein structures. Once the structures of the three basic components of the virus (membrane, casing and virions, which would be the red "points" were collected) the Autodesk 3ds Max program did the rest. But the colors with which we represent the virus, its grayish and rough appearance reminiscent of a stone or the menacing red of the virers, are the result of the intuition of Eckert and Higgins.

Coming out of the world of medicine and scientific research institutes, the most everyday representations that the general population makes of the virus move through emojis. According to a report by Emojipedia on Twitter's most used emojis, there is a huge increase in the one called "Microbe" to talk about coronavirus. It is also a not entirely correct representation – it is indeed a microbe and not a virus – although the iOS version of the emoji is a good approximation to the actual appearance of the virus. But after all, private social media and WhatsApp are certainly not channels of scientific information nor should they be considered such even if each sharing, each image strengthens the identity that we attribute to the virus in our mind and decreases our anxiety, gives us the certainty that what we are facing is not abstract but, on the contrary, tangible, physical and manageable. What is certain is that when this moment is passed and the Covid-19 will be just a memory, the image of Eckert and Higgins will remain powerful because it will become the symbol of the first dramatic collective experience of the globalized world.