A University of Florida research team is helping to build the case that coronaviruses move between animals and people at a more frequent rate than previously understood.
Earlier this year, the team reported the first known instance of a coronavirus common in pigs to have “spilled over” into people. Spillovers refer to events where a virus that is adapted to a certain kind of host—say, a dog, or pig—acquires features that allow it to infect an entirely different species of host, such as a person.