Dr Shi Zhengli, China’s “bat woman”, recalls her Wuhan institute's director telling her on the phone to “drop whatever you are doing and deal with it now”, that being the "mysterious patient samples" which had arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology at 7 pm on December 30, 2019. Shi had just "walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan." "The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, , and it wanted Shi’s renowned laboratory to investigate." "“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”"[1, 2, 3] SARS-CoV-2 ORIGINS
