Counting the number of COVID-19 deaths is hard. It is also very dangerous. The reason is that if you detect someone with COVID-19, you might get it too. This is not good news, so we try to catch bats. Since COVID-19 comes from bats, we can measure the number of bats and try to find out how many deaths there will be. This is one purpose of catching bats. The other is to not allow the bats to even get to humans. “‘The goal is to prevent the virus from getting into the humans in the first place,’ says Marc Valitutto, lead author of the study and a former wildlife veterinarian with the Global Health Program.” It is not easy to do this: “Searching for new viruses is ‘a grueling job,’ he adds, ‘but this is what’s required if you want to prevent 90,000 deaths, which is what we’re seeing today. So, it’s a small investment monetarily compared to what we’re spending now.’” Also, “Zoonotic pathogens, which spread between animals and humans, have caused almost three[-]quarters[!] of infectious diseases in humans [in only] this century. This interaction happens because of changes in land use and other human behavior.” Bats are not rare though, “One cave that the researchers studied in Myanmar, Linno Cave, had more than half a million bats. Tourists would visit the area to watch the bats leave the cave each night. Caves in Myanmar also serve as religious sites, and local people go there to collect bat droppings for fertilizer.” This may be one of the reasons there are so many COVID-19 cases. “We have been saying within the medical community, ‘An epidemic is coming, it’s coming soon, it’s likely to be one of these three or four viral families, it has the potential to kill a lot of people,’ Murray says. ‘Until it really touches people, it’s hard to recognize how connected we are. And as long as something’s happening across an ocean and far away, sometimes it’s hard to really feel the relevance of it.’ People now realize, she says, that “we’re more connected than we think we are.”
