We probably won’t see the next COVID-19 coming
There has not been enough surveillance of wild animal communities to fully understand which ones are harboring zoonotic viruses. (Christine K. Johnson, UC Davis/)Late in 2019, the virus that causes COVID-19 created its first documented cases among several dozen people connected to an outdoor market in Wuhan, China. It’s not entirely clear how the virus found its way into people, but scientists are pretty sure that it came from an as-yet-unidentified animal.Although most pathogens don’t go on to fuel pandemics like the novel coronavirus did, it’s all too common for diseases to travel from animals into people. These illnesses, known as zoonotic diseases, can spread rapidly because people have no prior immunity to them.Now, scientists are taking a sweeping look at zoonotic viruses and what causes them to spill over into people, and some key patterns directly related to human actions have come into view. The same practices that imperil...