Want to worry about the next pandemic? Spillover.global has you covered - Ars Technica

But previous experience with other coronaviruses that jumped into humans (SARS and MERS) told us that something like COVID-19 could pose a risk.

Now, researchers are taking the results of a massive virus survey and releasing a public database of hundreds of viruses, all rated for how much risk the viruses pose to humans.

Knowing the genome sequence of the viruses doesn't tell us much about the risk the viruses pose to humans on their own.

To figure out what's important, the researchers got 150 virology and public health experts to consider 50 different potential risk factors, including the host species carrying a virus, the location in which species was found, and the species' evolutionary relationship to known viruses.

Some of the important risk factors that were consistently rated highly were obvious: frequency of interactions with humans and our livestock, the ability to infect a variety of hosts, and modes of transmission.

But we simply don't have enough data on most viruses to evaluate them properly.

The net result is a spillover score, the best estimate of the risk each of these viruses pose to humans, awkwardly rated on a score of 1 to 155 (this is what happens when you start with 50 factors scored from 1-5, weigh them to varying degrees, and then throw some of them out).

We also know a lot more about other viruses' normal hosts, while we haven't identified the host species of SARS-CoV-2 before it moved into humans.

For one, because they're already tracked intensively, influenza viruses are not in the database.

Second, while it represents a lot of work, the hundreds of viruses described here are a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 1.7 million viruses that infect mammals and birds.

Several of the viruses that hadn't been described before are rated as more threatening than viruses that we already know can make the leap into humans.