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Asked by anon-249896 to SarahCarter, Ricardo, Kate, Amadou on 5 Mar 2020.
Question: how did fish and bats start the coronavirus?
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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.
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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.
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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.
Comments
anon-249958 commented on :
What if they did some sort of bat blood test and see what type of diseases they have and what they eat has harmful stuff. I thought that might be a good idea as it always works on us humans, so why shouldn’t it work on animals such as bats?
anon-250025 commented on :
I have learnt there is a slight chance it might be from broken up plastic over years that has built up bacteria.
Ebrima commented on :
This is an excellent question!!
I am not really sure how it started but I know some diseases can jump from animals to humans. We called those diseases as Zoonotic Diseases. It will take sometime before research investigations will come up with the conclusion as how it all started. We will wait and see.
Mod Em commented on :
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