As the United States passes one million mortalities after three years of this horrid pandemic, we must learn lessons to avoid the next one. The most important beginning point is that Covid-19 is a zoonotic disease, that is, originally transmitted to humans via wild animals. Flowing from this are four discrete policy steps to reduce wildlife disease risks that we should take going forward. It’s important to recognize that Homo sapiens has inflicted new diseases onto wild animals that are proportionally worse than what bats and other animals have done to us. We need vastly greater resources aimed at stopping future disease losses on both sides of the equation. We need to set the ecological scales right. In fact, ecohealth is just what we need.
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