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.
> 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.
Doesn't that mean COVID19 occurring naturally in Hubei is highly unlikely ?
No one expected spillover of a SARS-like virus from bats anywhere in Hubei. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, since the scientific consensus is sometimes wrong; but no significant new evidence has yet emerged to make that more likely. The closest bat viruses in nature (BANAL-20) were discovered post-pandemic in Laos.
Most people who believe SARS-CoV-2 arose by natural zoonosis propose something similar to SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit. It's also possible that a human was infected elsewhere, and then traveled to Wuhan and seeded the pandemic--the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is highly stochastic until the case count gets big, so they wouldn't necessarily have seeded other clusters along the way. It's all pretty mysterious though, much more so than the emergence of the two previous coronavirus human pathogens (SARS-1 and MERS).