Sometime in 2012 in Yunnan province, China, 6 miners become seriously ill with respiratory symptoms after shovelling bat faeces at the bottom of a mine shaft. The miner’s respiratory virus (RaBtCoV/4991) was said to came from rufous horseshoe bats.
The mineshaft floor was covered with a fungus. “Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners” Shi speculated “it would only have been a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.”
“Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mineshaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonia-like diseases (two of them died). After sampling the cave for a year the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory of new viruses.” [2]
Since 2013 the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been experimenting with these bat coronaviruses, including their use in 2015 controversial gain-of-function study.
In February 3, 2020, Shi Zhengli et al published paper suggesting SARS-CoV-2 genome was almost 80% identical to that of SARS-CoV, the virus that caused SARS in 2002, but it was 96.2% similar to RaTG13 another genome from Yunnan bat caves. [1]