‘Outbreak could have been stopped in its tracks’

COVID-19 could have been stopped if officials hadn’t ignored past research, animal disease experts have warned.

Prof Andrew Cunningham, the deputy director of science at the Zoological Society of London said the disease was “not only predictable, but predicted” as he declared it fortunate that the virus is not as deadly as other known zoonotic diseases – those that transfer from animals to humans. He told The Sunday Telegraph that experts had been warning for years that zoonotic spillover was a growing threat.

He also said the world will be faced with more deadly viruses like Covid-19. He added that a better understanding of these diseases would have denied the coronavirus the conditions that have allowed it to kill more than 10,000 people so far and said governments must not return to “business as usual” once the pandemic has ended. Prof Cunningham cited increased contact with wildlife, heightened exposure to different species such as bats, the speed of global travel and the growing human population as key reasons for the increased zoonotic spillover.

The coronavirus is understood to have originated in a “wet market” in the Chinese city of Wuhan, with the original host believed to be bats.

“We have seen this happen before,” Prof Cunningham told The Telegraph. “Unless human behaviours and activities change, we are going to see it happen again. The frequency of occurrence of zoonotic spillover is increasing in recent decades. That is because of the way we interact with wildlife now.

“All these things have happened in the last 50 or 60 years. We are living in an entirely different world. We have created an entirely unnatural ecosystem for ourselves and that is leading to the increased chance of novel pathogen spillover from wildlife into people.”