Novel diseases like covid-19 are being trigged in large part by industrial encroachment into forests and other natural ecosystems. We can see this happening in the data on material extraction. Check this out:
Here is the material consumption of the global economy, including everything from biomass to mining, all of which represents extraction from nature. We blew past the sustainable boundary for extraction in 1999, and it has been accelerating since (so much for "green growth"). 
Much of this recent rise has been driven by China, which is where a number of zoonoses have originated in consequence. But the story is much more complicated than it seems...
End-product material consumption in China is actually only a fraction of that in high-income nations like the US and UK, in per capita terms. So what's going on here?
Basically, rich countries have outsourced much of their extraction to China. They rely on this for their high levels of material consumption. Here is the total material impact of exports from China. It's huge.
And these are low-ball estimates. It measures the material impacts of the exports themselves, but does not include all of the infrastructure that China has built up to support that flow of exports (the factories, the roads, the ports, etc).
In other words, the huge scale of extraction in China is being driven in large part (disproportionately, that is) by excess consumption in high-income nations.
This is not to exonerate China. The Chinese approach to development has overshot planetary boundaries (although, again, not nearly as badly as in the West). This needs to change. First step: the Chinese govt needs to start capping material extraction, and *urgently*.
But ultimately China is just the latest frontier for extraction by a growth-addicted global economy that's driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation. This will continue to be a problem, with new frontiers, until we shift to a post-growth, post-capitalist economy.
A first step in this direction is for high-income countries to impose a declining cap on total material footprint (including the impacts of imports), to bring the scale of consumption back in line with the living world (i.e., about 8 tons per capita).
