something strange about this virus

Now that we’re a few months into dealing with the pandemic most call COVID-19, something just occurred to me.

Doctors have been telling us from the beginning that the virus is transmitted on tiny droplets of water in people’s breath, right? Basically, someone who’s infected (whether they know it or not) coughs or sneezes, and a bunch of little water drops spew into the air with virus on them, and then someone else breathes that into their lungs.

The Centers for Disease Control say that COVID-19 can’t be spread by food. That’s why restaurants have been able to stay open and provide carry-out service. A dead and cooked hamburger can’t breathe in the virus from an infected cook, and it can’t breathe out on a customer, so food is safe.

But then I thought back to how this pandemic started in the first place. Some dude in southern China presumably ate a bat that was infected. Surely the bat was dead from being cooked, so there’s no way the bat could have breathed out to infect the human. And the human who ate it couldn’t have been breathing in, because it’s impossible to swallow food and breathe at the same time (thank you, epiglottis).

So something about this story doesn’t add up. Anyone have an explanation?