In other words, new coronaviruses are constantly jumping from bats and other animals into people - a process scientists call "spillover."
If you expand those findings to all parts of Southeast Asia where people are exposed to these bats, Daszak estimates that more than a million people are infected with unknown coronaviruses each year. "That's pretty high," says Peter Daszak, who helped to lead the study. In one area, they found that nearly 3% of people had been infected with an unknown coronavirus in the past few years. The team drew blood from about 400 people and looked for signs of coronavirus antibodies in their blood. Now the two big questions are: How often do these viruses jump from animals into people and how often do they make people sick?īack in 2018, scientists at the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance tried to answer that question in communities from southern China, including villages in the same province where Holmes trapped the bats. Many types of animals carry these viruses, including dogs, cats, birds, chickens, pigs and rodents. "The virusphere of coronaviruses is just immense."Īnd these pathogens aren't just hanging out in bats. "We're only just starting to scratch the surface," he says. "And there's just an enormous number of them."Īnd depending on how you define a virus species, Holmes says, there are likely thousands of different coronaviruses all around the world. You'd find an amazing diversity of coronaviruses," Holmes says. "So imagine if you ran our experiment across the whole of Southeast Asia.
On top of that, Holmes says, the bat species carrying these viruses are common across most of Southeast Asia. Holmes and his team found that the bats harbored 24 new coronaviruses, including four closely related to the virus that causes COVID-19, or SARS-CoV-2, and three viruses closely related to SARS-CoV, which caused a smaller outbreak back in 2003. "So in this very small area that we sampled, about 1,100 hectare, there's an amazing number of bat viruses," says Holmes, who reported the findings online last week. Then they looked for coronavirus genes inside the samples. They took samples of the bats' saliva, urine and feces. This past year, Holmes and his colleagues trapped several hundred bats in a tiny section of the Yunnan province in southern China - an area about the size of Los Angeles International Airport. We live in a kind of coronavirus world," says virologist Edward Holmes at the University of Sydney. "Coronaviruses are under our feet in rodents. So they've gone hunting for potential sources - and the news is a bit concerning.
Now, scientists are worried that another coronavirus will strike again, from either a bat or some other animal. It looked like the virus jumped from a bat into humans. When the pandemic began last year, scientists went looking for the origins of the coronavirus. Scientists are looking for potential sources for a possible next coronavirus pandemic. A researcher with Franceville International Medical Research Centre collects bats in a net on Noveminside a cave in Gabon.
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