We still have a lot here in California fortunately due to our wildlife protection laws... Even so some species are having problems because some of the more conservative governors have been less than helpful towards environmental issues.

@MissKathleen Bat populations across North America have been decimated by White Nose syndrome over the last decade. in many part of their range they have been reduced by as much as 99%

Actually COVID-19 is just a new evolution of SARS and MERS viruses out of China that came from bats that they were eating there...

@MissKathleen Sadly its still working its way

@Lizard_of_Ahaz To be honest there is no direct evidence that it came from bats either from feces or eating, from science daily...
"This evidence for natural evolution was supported by data on SARS-CoV-2's backbone -- its overall molecular structure. If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness. But the scientists found that the SARS-CoV-2 backbone differed substantially from those of already known coronaviruses and mostly resembled related viruses found in bats and pangolins."
for the full article go to [sciencedaily.com]

@glennlab Science daily is not an academic resource.... As for MERS the origin was Saudi Arabia and traced to camels in the region, But SARS and CIVID have been traced to bats in Asia....
[nature.com]

@glennlab [niaid.nih.gov]

@Lizard_of_Ahaz "Research evidence suggests that SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV originated in bats, and it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 did as well." is a long way from people got it from eating bats. Try again.
By the way the article I quoted is a synopsis of an article in Nature Medicine, a peer reviewed journal.

@glennlab [scientificamerican.com]

@glennlab [businessinsider.com]

@glennlab How about a citation for your claims?...

@Lizard_of_Ahaz Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nature Medicine, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9 and science Daily is a scientific resource.

@Lizard_of_Ahaz Neither of these say that the disease came from eating bats, in fact both state something quite different. Simply finding an article that says that bats have closely related viruses is not saying that it came from bats. The ONLY scientific article quoted states that it most likely came from bats or pangolins, perhaps if you read the whole article before posting it you would see what it said. from the non science article "Bats can pass along viruses in their poop: If they drop feces onto a piece of fruit that a civet then eats, the civet can become a disease carrier." that you referenced.

@glennlab Nothing will ever satisfy a closed mind will it?...