Ah, of course! I was thinking of this incident specifically, though it seems I remembered the details wrong; the miners who died seemingly did so before the WIV got involved:
> From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine. (...) The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from the site.
> Since the middle of last year, Li's postgraduate thesis has been circulated online as purported evidence that a coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 could have been infecting humans as early as 2012.
> Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13.
Wow, thank you I haven't seen this before. If true, that's smoking gun stuff.
I'm not sure where people developed this idea that coronaviruses don't exist near Wuhan. I've corrected it like a dozen times in this thread, but there are absolutely horseshoe bats in Hubei and there are absolutely coronaviruses in those bats -- including some close ancestors to SarsCov2.
Thanks for the correction. So some coronaviruses have been found in nature in Hubei, but surely in rural areas correct? Why would the center of a dense city like Wuhan be the epicenter for an outbreak (according to the official story a wet market that contained no bats walking distance from the Wuhan laboratory), and not an area where bats exist?
You were mistaken to say just "coronaviruses" instead of "the greatest diversity of sarbecoviruses", but your comment was otherwise in line with the pre-pandemic consensus--no one expected spillover in Wuhan. Dr. Zhengli Shi, whose research is at the heart of this controversy, wrote in an interview:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
That said, it's no surprise that SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in a city, since it spreads most effectively in dense crowds. Even if spillover occurred in a small village, it's unlikely that enough people would die for anyone to notice until the virus reached a dense city--the virus's IFR isn't that high, and people die of other respiratory diseases every day. There's just no specific reason to expect that city would be Wuhan.
SARS-1 also emerged in a city far from the bat caves; but in that case, infected animals sold in markets there were identified, and the supply chain for those animals led back to likely bat spillover regions. For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found, despite much greater effort to search. That's not proof of unnatural origin, and there are other viruses for which the proximal host isn't known (e.g. Ebola); but that's different from both SARS-1 and MERS.