The now prophetic words could be found buried at the end of a
research paper published in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews in October of 2007: "The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic animals in southern China, is a time bomb."
The warning — made nearly 13 years ago and more than four years after a worrying first wave of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or
SARS, killed nearly 800 people globally — was among the earliest to predict the emergence of something like SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the current pandemic of Covid-19.
Many other warnings would follow.
Indeed, evidence of a looming and more deadly coronavirus pandemic
had been building for years, but experts who specialize in coronaviruses — a large family of pathogens found especially in
birds and mammals that can cross over from other mammals to humans and cause varying degrees of illness — struggled to convince a broader audience of the risk. Dogged by skepticism and inconsistent funding, these coronavirus researchers say they were stymied from developing treatments and vaccines for SARS — many of which could have been helpful in the current crisis. Much about what we learned about SARS would have applied now, according to Michael Buchmeier, a virologist at the University of California, Irvine. "The viruses are so similar."