Nearly 500 million people in "Science" live in areas where the coronavirus may overflow. The new crown is just the tip of the iceberg, and there will be more SARS-like viruses.

On September 15, researchers published an article in " Science " entitled " SARS-like viruses may jump from animals to people hundreds of thousands of times a year ",Aroused heated discussion.

"The number has great warning significance, which will open the eyes of the entire scientific community, because we don't know the frequency of the spread of zoonotic diseases," did not participate in this study Angela Rasmussen , a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan at the University of Saskatchewan, said, “This needs to be changed, because otherwise we seriously underestimate this.”

includes Peter Daszak of the Eco-Health Alliance and Duke National University School of Medicine in Singapore Researchers including Linfa Wang , drew detailed maps of the habitats of 23 bat species known to carry SARS-related coronaviruses. SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 belong to this category, and then compare them with Data on places where humans live is superimposed to draw a hotspot map of potential infections. They found that nearly 500 million people live in areas where spillover effects may occur, including northern India, Nepal, Myanmar and most of Southeast Asia. Southern China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Java island and other Indonesian islands are at the highest risk (see picture below).

The map shows the relative spillage risk of the SARS-associated coronavirus. China and Southeast Asian countries are potential hot spots for human infection . C. A. SÁNCHEZ ET AL., MEDRXIV (2021) 10.1101/2021.09.09.21263359

Daszak said: “ This is an authoritative analysis of where the next SARS or coronavirus-like virus is most likely to appear on the earth."These maps can detect new outbreaks earlier by changing the behavior of high-risk communities and targeted monitoring, thereby working hard to reduce the possibility of the spread of the epidemic. Daszak is "the new crown virus comes from the wild, not a research laboratory." Active supporters of this hypothesis, these maps can also guide the search for the natural source of the virus. (Several studies are ongoing or planned. is looking for the new coronavirus and its relatives in horseshoe bats and other animals. )

But the researchers' previous research has been one step closer. A small survey conducted before the outbreak of the new coronavirus showed that some people in Southeast Asia have the antibody against the SARS-related coronavirus. This data is related to the frequency of people contacting bats. Combined with the length of time the antibody stays in the blood, the researchers calculated that there are about 400,000 cases of undetected humans in the region each year, .

Daszak said: "People interact with bats. It's much more common than people think. Just living there means you are exposed to it: people hide in caves, they dig out bird droppings from caves, and prey on bats. "

He also pointed out that this paper did not even mention how many people are engaged in the wildlife trade , When a bat virus first infects another animal, how many people may be indirectly infected .

Rasmussen said: "Although 400,000 infections per year sounds like a lot, in an area where there may be hundreds of millions of bats and nearly 500 million people, there are not so many. "However, the annual confidence interval ranges from 1 case to more than 35 million cases of recessive infection ,Rasmussen joked: "This is enough to fly the entire horseshoe bat population."

Vincent Munster , a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who studies coronavirus, said: "The quality of the model depends on the input to the model. "Data in the database." He pointed out that 's data on antibodies only includes a few thousand people, and the analytical methods used to detect antibodies can easily lead to false positives.

Rasmussen said that most recessive infections of may be short-lived and will not lead to further spread because the virus is not adaptable to humans. They may not infect enough cells or the correct type of cells to spread the infected person to another person; or they may not be able to evade human immune defenses. In the case where the virus does spread, pure opportunity may restrict it to a small, isolated community .