Virus suspected to be spreading from bats to snakes to humans
The Wuhan virus, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has named the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV, has crossed some boundaries.
The latest word is that it has gone
from bats to snakes to humans, and is now being spread via human-to-human transmission.
Crossing the animal-human threshold, as well as the cold-blooded-warm-blooded threshold is disconcerting.
The reason pandemics happen is because infections happen easily, but the virus does not kill its hosts too quickly.
This gives time for the virus to be passed on to the next host instead of resulting in its own destruction if its host dies too quickly.
As long as the virus infects the hosts and gives them some time to live, it will increase the virus’ exposure to other hosts.