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The perfect virus: two gene tweaks that turned COVID-19 into a killer
If you were to hold a horseshoe bat in your hand, it would barely fill your palm, and weigh little more than a ballpoint pen.
The creatures live in the darkness.
Their name comes from their oddly-shaped noses, which look like upward-pointed horseshoes.
- Liam Mannix
- The Age
Generally we ignore them and they ignore us. In 2013, in the Chinese province of Yunnan, about 2000 kilometres south-west of Wuhan, a horseshoe bat was caught in a trap.
Chinese scientists swabbed its mouth and checked the saliva for virus genes.
Bats’ tiny bodies teem with viruses.
But this bat had a virus researchers had never seen before.
It was a…