Thread by @wormmaps

The next coronavirus is here. 🦠🚨

We're learning today that alphacoronavirus 1, previously not known to be zoonotic, jumped from dogs to humans > a year ago. Key lessons for where COVID-19 has been pointing us the wrong direction 🧵

npr.org/sections/goats…

1⃣ Singular focus on wildlife trade / wildlife farming as a human-animal interface is a mistake, given other natural pathways of emergence like, here, pet dogs or cats (probably).

This has *always* been true, even - maybe especially - for coronaviruses:
nature.com/articles/s4157…

(This doesn't mean we have to start getting rid of pets / livestock to prevent pandemics! The point of building strong healthcare systems - including One Health monitoring systems that include vets - is to stay safe by catching these kinds of events early and often.)

2⃣ Why does spillover happen?

Given that there's so much moralistic stuff coming from conservation about how we should prevent pandemics - it's about what you eat! it's about cutting down the rainforest! - it's worth noting this just... doesn't fit that pattern at all.

(One of the biggest misconceptions I wish we could combat: spillover isn't necessarily anyone's *fault*. It's increasingly a product of anthropogenic disturbance, but also a natural part of living alongside animals, even safely - like you live happily along your dog or cat.)

3⃣ Notification systems aren't fixed yet.

A novel coronavirus jumped into human populations last year (!) and we're just now finding out. There's a mismatch between scientific publication schedules, emergency notification systems, and countries' data sharing obligations.

(This is where future international law, including both changes to the IHRs and novel systems like a pandemic treaty, have the opportunity to learn and grow. We have more systems like this for flu; we need broader preparedness for zoonotic emergence.)

4⃣ Viral discovery isn't everything.

Alphacoronavirus 1 was first noticed in the 1940s, and first isolated in 1965. There are hundreds of undiscovered coronaviruses, but the next one to make the jump was actually one we already knew. That was able to happen because....

5⃣ Evolutionary shifts happen constantly.

There are some very smart people who say that we shouldn't try to predict future zoonoses, because of those evolutionary dynamics, and I'm sympathetic to that point for sure...

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs…

But then again, I think we sell our ability to guess this stuff short a lot of the time. For example, a recent study by colleagues predicts alphacoronavirus 1 as a high risk for undiscovered zoonotic potential:

nardusmollentze.com/dataset/zoonot…

🔢 The bottom line is, I would love to see scientists / communicators / the public engage with this as a useful case study. We've been telling so many stories about COVID-19 that just won't generalize well to the next Disease X - or, in this case, even the next coronavirus.

Oh and because it's a bit hard to find the link:

academic.oup.com/cid/advance-ar…

(Oh and one last point: if it seems like this thread makes too much of one emerging virus, just remember the big difference between this and COVID-19 as case studies is transmissibility after the spillover; we've been over-reading COVID-19 as a "lesson" this whole time)