There is plenty of evidence that some of these viruses are spilling over to humans all the time in southern China, Daszak says. In an earlier paper, Daszak and co-workers found SARS-related antibodies to coronaviruses in about 3% of people they sampled in China living near bat caves, suggesting they had been infected by some of these viruses. He argues that the world needs to change its approach and go from reacting to pandemics to trying to identify dangerous coronaviruses before they emerge. Many more viruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2 are just waiting to be discovered in wildlife, Daszak says. “But, of course, if history repeats itself, by the time we’ve found all the rest of the SARS-2 clade, something else will be emerging.”
