Coronavirus prevalence in bats from Panama

Bats are natural reservoirs of various types of viruses, especially coronaviruses, constituting approximately 31% of all viruses in this group. Bats can become a source of direct or indirect transmission, infecting humans and generating epidemic and even pandemic outbreaks. Panama has more than 118 species of bats recorded, of which some are likely hosts of various types of coronaviruses. However, studies have yet to be conducted in our country to determine the existence and prevalence of coronavirus in bats since they might be a risk for zoonotic transmissions. To determine the prevalence of coronavirus in bats from Panama, 217 specimens of 48 species of bats were captured in different sites of the country. Fecal samples were collected from the captured specimens to determine the presence of coronavirus by amplifying a 440 bp region of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) gene using conventional RT-PCR and real-time PCR. No positive results for the presence of coronavirus were obtained in any of the 217 samples tested with the two PCR techniques used in this work. Positive and negative controls for all step procedures yielded the expected results with both techniques. The negative results obtained in our study in detecting coronavirus do not necessarily imply that bats in Panama are not reservoirs of coronavirus. Our results suggest that the prevalence of coronavirus in the bat species collected in Panama is considerably low, which did not allow us to detect positives. Further studies analyzing more samples per species and more species will confirm these findings.