• Question: how did fish and bats start the coronavirus?

    Asked by anon-249896 to SarahCarter, Ricardo, Kate, Amadou on 5 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Sarah Carter

      Sarah Carter answered on 5 Mar 2020:

      Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer to this, beyond the fact that every living creature carries a different set of bacteria and viruses and those bacteria/viruses can have different influences on different animals. Something that a fish or a bat safely carries may be harmful for certain types of people, which may have been the case here. However, as far as I know, scientists working on coronavirus haven’t yet figured out exactly where it came from.

    • Photo: Ricardo Sanchez

      Ricardo Sanchez answered on 5 Mar 2020:

      At the moment it is not possible to say where the virus comes from. Occasionally, viruses will jump from animals into humans and vice versa… but it takes years to investigate how it jumped to humans.

    • Photo: Kate Mitchell

      Kate Mitchell answered on 6 Mar 2020: last edited 18 Mar 2020 7:31 pm

      We don’t know for sure where the coronavirus came from. It is similar to a virus that infects bats, so it may have come from bats. But there’s still more research to be done on this.

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