We're about to enter year three of the coronavirus, and yeah.

More than 800,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19, and it's not done with us yet.

The Omicron Coronavirus variant is keeping a gistory world off kilter.

President Biden is making a plea to the unvaccinated as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus spreads.

You're dealing with a virus that has an unprecedented capability of spreading extremely rapidly.

Hopefully this damn nightmare will end, but it's unlikely to be the last pandemic of our lifetimes.

Because, well, the virus that could cause the next one is probably already out there.

I'm Gustavo Ariano. You're listening to The Times, Daily News from the LA Times. It's Wednesday,

January 5th, 2022. There's hundreds of thousands of viruses and animals with the potential to infect humans.

And our behavior, deforestation, urbanization, as well as climate change, it's pushing us into

closer contact with them.

Today, we're going to offer an example.

The troubling science coming out of the Amazon rainforest, it used to be known as the lungs

of planet Earth, but now the Amazon offers a warning to us all.

My colleagues, Kate Lentigham and Emily Baumgartner, wrote a story about this.

Kate is a foreign correspondent based in Mexico City, and Emily is a national correspondent focused on medical investigations.

Both of your says, welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

Emily, most scientists believe that the virus that causes COVID-19 originated in animals before spreading to humans.

It's something called zoonotic spillover, and in our current era, it's happening a lot more frequently.

What's driving this increase?

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