Thousands of COVID-Like Cases With Animal Source Raise Risk of Future Pandemics

“This is probably the first attempt to estimate how often people are infected with SARS-related coronaviruses from bats,” Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who wasn’t involved in the research was quoted as saying, adding that humans are continually exposed to bat coronaviruses. “Given the right set of circumstances, one of these could eventually lead to a disease outbreak,” he said.

Almost two dozen bat species that can be infected by coronaviruses dwell in an area of Asia more than six times the size of Texas, with southern China and parts of Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia deemed the riskiest for spillovers, Bloomberg reported.

Peter Daszak and colleagues at the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance used bat distribution modelling and ecological and epidemiological data to estimate the risk of exposure to SARS-related coronaviruses, and the rate of unreported bat-to-human infections in China, South Asia and Southeast Asia.