There’s a new 300-mile high-speed railway line from China to Laos that scientists worry will hasten the arrival of the next pandemic. It cuts through virgin forest where more than two dozen different coronaviruses were found by French researchers in 645 bats in 2020-21, Reuters reports. The trains bring people into contact with the bats, and those people into contact with other people. The source of Covid hasn’t been established but it’s likely to have been localised for some time in a bat population in southern China before moving to other species before humans.
