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09.17.2021

How often do coronaviruses jump from animals to humans?

COVID-19 Coronavirus

Coronavirus with spike proteins

While there have only been two widespread coronavirus outbreaks in the past 20 years or so (SARS and COVID-19), a new paper suggests that spillovers from animals to humans is happening at a much more frequent rate.

A preprint in medRxiv, Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance and Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, suggest that up to 400,000 people a year are likely infected with SARS-related coronaviruses in South and Southeast Asia, These infections do not grow into widespread outbreaks, since the viruses are not adapted to humans.

400,000 spillovers sounds like a lot of infection but virologist Angela Rasmussen believes it is a fairly reasonable estimate. She tells Science, “in a region with likely hundreds of millions of bats and nearly half a billion people it isn’t that many.”

Zoonotic infection of humans is not well understood. This work is part of an effort to learn more about hot diseases jump from animal species to infect humans.

09.28.2012

sars-like virus has bat origins

Genomic sequencing  of a SARS-like virus suggests retlation to a virus that is known to infect bats. From NPR news:

Dutch virologists have just published the whole genome of the new coronavirus — all 30,118 letters of its code. And, the sequence reveals that the mystery virus is most closely related to coronaviruses that infect bats in Southeast Asia.

In fact, the pathogen is more similar to two bat viruses than it is to the human SARS virus that sent the world into a panic when it infected nearly 8,000 people in 2003.

Virologist Ron Fouchier, who has done controversial work on bird flu viruses, led the sequencing effort of the SARS-like virus. He tells Shots the results suggest that the new coronavirus virus came from bats. “Bats harbor many coronaviruses, so it’s logical to assume that bats are the natural reservoir” of the new pathogen, he says.

“But this doesn’t mean the Saudi man contracted the virus from bats,” says Fouchier.

When viruses jump from animals to humans, there’s usually a second animal that connects the natural carrier with humans. This species is called the amplifier because it increases the number of viral particles that can hop over into people.

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