[sudosysgen]

Yes, the institute of Virology in Wuhan did research on bats up to thousands of kilometers away. There are, after all, only two BSL-4 labs.

However, there is a large population of bats right outside Wuhan, and you can find research by the WIV cataloguing different viruses found in the same province. For example : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31009304/

The key here is that the bats the virus (likely) came from are not actually thousands of miles from Wuhan, but only a few dozen. It's just that since the WIV is a huge institute they sometimes also do research in bats in other regions too, because they don't have such facilities.

[bb2018]

I'm a bit confused. That article doesn't mention viruses at all in its abstract, only bacterial studies.

My understanding is that the virus came from horseshoe bats. These largely live in Southern China. Wuhan is not Southern China. All studies of Corona viruses I can find deal with going to southern China (because that's where horseshoe bats live) to collect samples from horsehoe bats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563315/

Do you have a non-paywalled version to the link you provided? It says they looked at bacteria in bats in the abstract but didn't mention anything about which species of bats.

[sudosysgen]

I can't give you a non-paywalled link legally, but there are actually Shortridge horseshoe bats in Hubei.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortridge%27s_horseshoe_bat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubei

You can see that Hubei is indeed in the area where horseshoe bats are found.