It seems that the efforts to trace Covid-19 back to bats in the Wuhan province are pretty inconclusive. SARS and MERS were both definitively (?) traced back to bats, so people seem to have jumped to this conclusion. “Similar” viruses have been found in bats, but bats have all kinds of things and the family of coronaviruses seems to be extremely common. The WHO team does say it is extremely unlikely that any of the “several” laboratories studying coronaviruses in the city would have made a mistake leading to emergence of this virus. (This alone raises a few questions for me. Is it unusual for a city the size of Wuhan in China or other countries to have several laboratories with coronaviruses lying around? Or do most big cities have some kind of epidemiological laboratory, and the family of coronaviruses is so common that almost any lab would have examples of it in the fridge? What about the dangerous ones.) They also say definitively this is a natural virus, not a genetically engineered one.

I’ve been to “wet markets” in Singapore and Thailand, which could well be tame compared to the one in Wuhan, I have no idea. I would hypothesize that you have a lot of people working, shopping, and eating in very close proximity to each other. Sometimes you have people doing grosser things, like smoking, or spitting. Cats and dogs sometimes roam freely. And sometimes these markets are air conditioned, I have seen it both ways. So if someone already had the virus, it might have spread between people in the market and have nothing particularly to do with food or wild animals.

But I found it interesting to read what wild animals were actually for sale in the Wuhan market. Do people eat bats, or keep them as pets? (And before you judge as a westerner, be aware people in other cultures are just as horrified by some of our habits and things we eat as we are by some of theirs.)

The so-called wet market had 653 stalls and more than 1,180 employees supplying seafood products as well as fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, and live animals before it closed on Jan. 1, 2020. Days before, 10 stall operators were trading live wild animals, including chipmunks, foxes, raccoons, wild boar, giant salamanders, hedgehogs, sika deer. Farmed, wild and domestic animals were also traded at the market including snakes, frogs, quails, bamboo rats, rabbits, crocodiles and badgers…

Bloomberg

So no bats mentioned. I also find myself thinking about the various “bird flu” and “swine flu” scares of the past. It is often human-livestock contact that gives rise to concerning pathogens, so we should keep that in mind. And of course, there are still plenty of deadly pathogens being spread by mosquitoes, fleas and ticks while we are fixated on this one (admittedly horrific) unusual coronavirus incident.