Bats are carrying other coronaviruses that could transmit to humans, says Wuhan’s expert virologist

Dr Shi Zheng-Li is known as ‘Bat Woman’ for her ability to hunt down viruses from SARS to Covid-19

A renowned coronavirus expert at the Wuhan Institute of Virology told a medical panel this week that bats in China, and other south Asian countries, were carrying other coronaviruses which could be transmitted to humans.

Dr Shi Zheng-Li, who is known as “Bat Woman” for her ability to hunt down viruses from SARS to Covid-19, made the remarks at a webinar on Thursday during a joint session of the National Academy of Medicine and the Veterinary Academy of France.

Dr Shi said that some of viruses were similar to Sars-CoV-2, the name given to the 2019 novel coronavirus.

“We should not only search for them in China, but also in south Asian countries,” Dr Shi said.

Research by Dr Shi’s team has found other coronaviruses in regions of southern China. She added: “We think these viruses have a high risk of interspecies transmission to human.”

The conference brought together doctors, biologists and veterinarians from around the world to discuss Covid-19 in a “One Health” context involving animal, human and environmental health.

The virologist said that greater monitoring was needed of interactions between wild species and domesticated or farm animals, and also farm animals and humans.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced last month that it is sending an international team of experts to China to study how the pandemic began.

An AP investigation this week revealed that China fumbled its early response to the virus with top Chinese leaders delaying warning the public and withholding information from the WHO.

Additionally, widespread test shortages and problems at a time when the virus could have been slowed were caused largely by secrecy and cronyism at China’s top disease control agency, the news agency reported on Thursday.

China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention gave test kit designs and distribution rights exclusively to three then-obscure Shanghai companies with which officials had personal ties, the reporting found.

The flawed testing system prevented scientists and officials from seeing how fast the virus was spreading —grave mistakes that facilitated the virus’ spread through Wuhan and across the world undetected, in a pandemic that has now sickened more than 64 million people and killed almost 1.5 million.

SARS-CoV-2 probably originated in bats but Dr Shi, along with other scientists, believe that the virus made the jump from an intermediary host animal to humans in a “zoonotic spillover” event.

There is also a question mark over how long Sars-CoV-2 has been around, as Dr Shi told the panel that it could have been in humans or animals for a “very long time” before it was detected.

WHO investigators, and a separate team organized by The Lancet medical journal, may never establish the exact origins of the virus.

Dr Shi noted that if the intermediate carrier of the virus was a pangolin, as some studies have suggested, then there is a possibility that the virus originated in a bat outside of China. Pangolins are typically smuggled to China from other parts of Asia and Africa.

AP contributed to this report