‘Thousands of infections like Covid may pose pandemic risk’

Hundreds of thousands of people may be infected annually by animals carrying coronaviruses related to the one that causes Covid-19 each year in China and Southeast Asia, according to a study. An average of 4,00,000 such infections occur annually, most going unrecognised because they cause mild or no symptoms and aren’t easily transmitted between people, researchers with EcoHealth Alliance and Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School said in a study released on Thursday before peer review. Still, each spillover represents an opportunity for viral adaptation that could lead to a Covid-like outbreak. “This is probably the first attempt to estimate how often people are infected with SARS-related coronaviruses from bats,” said Edward Holmes, a biologist who wasn’t involved in the study. 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 south China and parts of Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia deemed riskiest for spillovers. Bloomberg