Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - According to a study released on Wednesday, over 66,000 people in Southeast Asia develop coronaviruses ...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - According to a study released on Wednesday, over 66,000 people in Southeast Asia develop coronaviruses linked to SARS each year, and close to 500 million people reside close to locations where the bat hosts of these viruses are present.
The study, which was released in Nature Communications, suggests that the likelihood of viral transmission from bats to people may have been "substantially underestimated," and its mapping of the many bat species in the region should assist researchers in determining the origin of COVID-19.
The study concentrated on 26 species of bats in a 5.1 million square kilometre (2 million square mile) region known to have coronaviruses comparable to SARS, which runs from China through Southeast and South Asia. The data on antibody levels among people who had claimed to have come into contact with bats was then added.
Southern China, northern Vietnam, northeastern Myanmar, and Laos have the widest variety of bat species that carry SARS-like coronaviruses (SARSr-CoVs).
"Our estimate that a median of 66,000 people catch SARSr-CoVs annually in Southeast Asia suggests that bat-to-human SARSr-CoV spillover is prevalent in the area, and is frequently missed by monitoring programmes and treatment trials," the researchers wrote.
The data on regional distribution and spillover volume, according to the paper, can be utilised to target surveillance and preventative efforts for potential future bat-CoV growth.
COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus strain.
The COVID-19 pandemic was first found in Wuhan towards the end of 2019, and a World Health Organization (WHO) team was sent there to investigate its causes. One of the report's authors is Peter Daszak.
Due to a lack of information from China, the WHO stated in June that it was difficult to determine when and how the coronavirus first infected individuals.
Live animal trade continues to be the most likely explanation for how the epidemic began, with two independent spillovers probably happening at the Huanan Seafood Market, where many of the earliest cases were concentrated, according to research published at the end of July in the journal Science.
