Global patterns in coronavirus diversity

Anthony, Simon J.; Johnson, Christine K.; Greig, Denise J.; Kramer, Sarah; Che, Xiaoyu; Wells, Heather; Hicks, Allison L.; Joly, Damien O.; Wolfe, Nathan D.; Daszak, Peter; Karesh, William; Lipkin, W. I.; Morse, Stephen S.; Mazet, Jonna A. K.; Goldstein, Tracey

A large number of host (bat) species in our study were negative for CoV (n ¼ 197) , however none of these species were sampled extensively (Fig. 6) . We found that all species with sample sizes >110 individuals were positive for one or more CoVs, suggesting that we would have detected CoVs in some of the negative species in our study if sampling effort were increased. Due to the high number of these negative species and their effect on the average number of virus sequence clusters per species, they were excluded from our estimates. By retaining only those species for which >110 individuals were sampled (there were twenty-seven species that qualified), we estimated the average number of CoVs per species to be 2.67 (std ¼ 1.38), thus accounting for the likely scenario that some species will have more viruses and others less. We then extrapolated the average to all 1,200 bat species to estimate a total potential richness of 3,204