THE world dodged a bullet in 2003 when a global effort contained the SARS coronavirus , after it jumped from bats to humans in China and then spread to 26 countries . We nearly had another close call when MERS, another bat coronavirus, spilled over into people in 2012.

A year later, Chinese scientists found SARS-like viruses in fruit bats that could infect human cells And in 2016 , the World Health Organization put coronaviruses among the top eight known viral threats requiring more research.

So you would think …