In a broken world struggling to recover from coronavirus, a new pandemic threatens to destroy the remnants of mankind. That is the storyline of Covid-21: Lethal Virus, a TV movie in post-production that imagines another coronavirus will emerge next year.

The low-budget film is unlikely to win any Oscars, but many scientists believe its premise is not far-fetched. The Covid-19 pandemic, which follows the Sars and Mers outbreaks, marks the third time since the turn of the century that a coronavirus is thought to have jumped from bats to humans before morphing into an epidemic.

Coronaviruses are thought to have been circulating in bats for centuries but have only recently become a leading source of zoonotic diseases, alongside other illnesses that originated in animals such as HIV, Ebola and Zika.