Quote:
Originally Posted by Levianon17
Ok lets take it at face value that Covid-19 is a natural Virus. What's the mode of transmission that enables the virus to enter the human population without having direct contact with the Bat species that is the reservoir?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Levianon17
Ok lets take it at face value that Covid-19 is a natural Virus. What's the mode of transmission that enables the virus to enter the human population without having direct contact with the Bat species that is the reservoir?
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Chinese miners were infected with a bat virus in 2012. They were clearing bat guano from the mine. Transmission would have been directly from horseshoe bats to humans, without going through another species. In fact, this virus may have evolved into COVID 19. Three of the miners died. I believe the Wall Street Journal and others reported that the Wuhan lab took coronavirus samples from the mine, and one of the viruses was 96% similar genetically to COVID 19. For comparison, SARS is 80% similar.
I read today that 3% of the people living in the vicinity of caves in southeast Asia tested positive for antibodies to bat viruses. And you extrapolate that to the general population and you could have up to 7 million people infected annually with bat viruses, I think just in that part of the world. Farmers use bat guano for fertilizer and get infected. The mode of transmission would be inhalation.
SARS and MERS are bat viruses too. I don't know if humans were directly infected by the bats or if those went through a third species.
DTickler came across a paper about the mine. Here's his link and my Cliff Notes version of what it said:
https://www.eccie.net/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=51
This paper says another virus was sampled from the mine that's 98.7% similar to COVID 19, although I haven't run across anything that would indicate the Wuhan lab was studying that one.
