The Great ReadThailand Dispatch
Thai Caves Attract Millions of Bats â and Now Scientists Too
A cave complex at a temple in Thailand has long drawn tourists, pilgrims and guano collectors. Now, scientists have arrived, looking for any potential links to the coronavirus.
A team of researchers catching bats as they fly out of the Khao Chong Phran cave at dusk.Credit.
PHOTHARAM, Thailand â The bat caves reeked of bat.
In the murk of the grottoes, in a cave complex west of Bangkok, Thais in headlamps and with flashlights went about their business.
Pilgrims to the temple that owns the complex prayed to Buddha figurines in one of the caves, the statuesâ carved expressions betraying no reaction to the plip-plop-ploop of bat droppings falling on their shoulders.
In the year since seafood hawkers started appearing at Wuhan’s hospitals sickened with a strange and debilitating pneumonia, the world has learned a lot about Covid-19, from the way it spreads to how to inoculate against the infection. Despite these advances, a chasm remains in our understanding of the virus that’s killed nearly 2 million people and whipsawed the global economy: we still don’t know how it began. Where the pathogen first emerged and how it transmitted to humans is a stubborn mystery, one that’s becoming more elusive with each passing month. Before the initial cluster among stall-holders at a produce market in central China, the trail largely goes cold, and the country the novel coronavirus hit first the place many blame for unleashing the disease on an under-prepared world now has little incentive to help find the true origin of the greatest public health emergency in a century.