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SvennoJ on 02 April 2020
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Lafiel said:
newwil7l said:
Eating bats needs to be banned and, offenders should be charged with biological terrorism. How many outbreaks need to happen to get this lesson through people's heads? Bats carry more pathogens than any other species.

the thing is, while bats are very likely the reservoir host of this disease and many others, they are unlikely to be the host the virus jumped to us from

for SARS it's highly likely that pigs were the host we got infected by, as they traced an infection route back to a pig farm that contained banana-trees infected fruit bats were eating from

edit: assuming SARS-CoV-2 did originate in bats it would for example be super interesting to know whether or not it can even infect the species of bats it came from anymore in it's current human transmissible form

The latest research suggests SARS-CoV-2 is a combination of two different strains
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/coronavirus-origins-genome-analysis-covid19-data-science-bats-pangolins/

On February 7, 2020, we learned that a virus even closer to SARS-CoV-2 had been discovered in pangolin. With 99% of genomic concordance reported, this suggested a more likely reservoir than bats. However, a recent study under review shows that the genome of the coronavirus isolated from the Malaysian pangolin (Manis javanica) is less similar to SARS-Cov-2, with only 90% of genomic concordance. This would indicate that the virus isolated in the pangolin is not responsible for the COVID-19 epidemic currently raging.

However, the coronavirus isolated from pangolin is similar at 99% in a specific region of the S protein, which corresponds to the 74 amino acids involved in the ACE (Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2) receptor binding domain, the one that allows the virus to enter human cells to infect them. By contrast, the virus RaTG13 isolated from bat R. affinis is highly divergent in this specific region (only 77 % of similarity). This means that the coronavirus isolated from pangolin is capable of entering human cells whereas the one isolated from bat R. affinis is not.

In addition, these genomic comparisons suggest that the SARS-Cov-2 virus is the result of a recombination between two different viruses, one close to RaTG13 and the other closer to the pangolin virus. In other words, it is a chimera between two pre-existing viruses.

This recombination mechanism had already been described in coronaviruses, in particular to explain the origin of SARS-CoV. It is important to know that recombination results in a new virus potentially capable of infecting a new host species. For recombination to occur, the two divergent viruses must have infected the same organism simultaneously.

Two questions remain unanswered: in which organism did this recombination occur? (a bat, a pangolin or another species?) And above all, under what conditions did this recombination take place?


Previous versions that jumped to humans via an intermediate species could not re-infect bats afaik.