[rory]

The horseshoe bat's range spans from Japan to Portugal. That doesn't change the fact that all the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 we've discovered have been found in the far south of China and Cambodia, 1-2k miles away, nor does the presence of more distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses.

If we find a closer relative near Wuhan, that will change the hypothesis. But we haven't.

[mikeyouse]

That’s not especially convincing to me because the closest relatives we’ve found aren’t actually very close relatives. Ratg13 is decades removed from the SC2 lineage, so knowing that it was found closer to Laos is a very weak signal in my opinion about the origins of SC2.

[tripletao]

As one of the parent comments has already noted, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known bat virus. BANAL-20-52's spike is only 16 AA substitutions away from SARS-CoV-2, and that was found in Laos.

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1440309655087902720?la...

No one expected spillover in Wuhan, including Dr. Shi, per the quote from her that I've replied with elsewhere. Even those very confident in natural zoonotic origin are typically proposing something like SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit, not spillover in Wuhan.