Lesson could be learnt from behaviour of bats

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 Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - 19:55

Provisional research, subject to peer-review and assessment by experts, on the environmental factors linked to the spread of COVID-19 suggests that ultraviolet radiation (UVR), temperature and humidity are factors affecting the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. 


A study posted as a pre-print on Cornell University’s arXiv server looked at Italy, Spain and Australia for a nine-week period following lockdown and found that the number of reported cases of COVID-19 decreased as natural ultraviolet radiation increased. High temperatures and humidity enhanced the effect. The researchers linked these results with the behaviour of coro-navirus-carrying bats and suggest that those features of bat behaviour, particularly nocturnal behaviour and living in caves and in large groups, are the long-term evolutionary features that have characterised coronaviruses over millions of years of coevolution with bats.

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