Author Correction: Ecology, evolution and spillover of coronaviruses from bats

Abstract

Cited references for data sourced from the PREDICT project were mislabeled as 'PREEMPT' in the Supplementary Data file originally published online. The supplementary data have been updated with the correct label.

Revising the paradigm: Are bats really pathogen reservoirs or do they possess an efficient immune system?

“…However, many viruses carried by bats cannot infect humans without first undergoing a natural process of evolution, meaning that bats carry the ancestral viruses and not the human pathogen (Forni et al, 2017;Clayton and Munir, 2020;Latinne et al, 2020). This is also what is known so far for COVID-19 (Poon et al, 2004;Boni et al, 2020;Ruiz-Aravena et al, 2022;Frutos et al, 2022). We should seek to avoid the disruption of their natural habitats that are resulting from rapid urbanization, (Greger, 2007).…”

“…COVID-19 is only one recent example of media reports (Zhou et al, 2020) connecting bats to human disease and targeting them as reservoir animals, despite a lack of evidence (Andersen et al, 2020). Although the coronavirus isolated from bats in Wuhan (China) was found to be 96% genetically identical to the beta coronavirus that started the current pandemic, this degree of similarity accounts for a temporal distance of several to many years between the two, when taking the mutation rate of the virus into account (Boni et al, 2020;Ruiz-Aravena et al, 2022). Notably, the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the bat virus cannot bind to human cells, indicating that it is not the direct source of the pandemic (Andersen et al, 2020;Chan et al, 2020;Ruiz-Aravena et al, 2022).…”

“…Although the coronavirus isolated from bats in Wuhan (China) was found to be 96% genetically identical to the beta coronavirus that started the current pandemic, this degree of similarity accounts for a temporal distance of several to many years between the two, when taking the mutation rate of the virus into account (Boni et al, 2020;Ruiz-Aravena et al, 2022). Notably, the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the bat virus cannot bind to human cells, indicating that it is not the direct source of the pandemic (Andersen et al, 2020;Chan et al, 2020;Ruiz-Aravena et al, 2022). Although there is some evidence that the potential ancestral COVID-19 virus had originated in bats (Shereen et al, 2020), to date, two years after the pandemic first struck, we still do not know the direct source of the human pathogenic COVID-19 variant (Ruiz-Aravena et al, 2022;Frutos et al, 2022).…”

“…Notably, the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the bat virus cannot bind to human cells, indicating that it is not the direct source of the pandemic (Andersen et al, 2020;Chan et al, 2020;Ruiz-Aravena et al, 2022). Although there is some evidence that the potential ancestral COVID-19 virus had originated in bats (Shereen et al, 2020), to date, two years after the pandemic first struck, we still do not know the direct source of the human pathogenic COVID-19 variant (Ruiz-Aravena et al, 2022;Frutos et al, 2022). The bats' widespread image as a danger to public health will, however, be difficult to rehabilitate (Zaho, 2020;MacFarlane and Rocha, 2020).…”