China after six men who had been clearing out bat feces there contracted a severe pneumonia, the newspaper said.Three of them died and the most likely cause was a coronavirus transmitted from a bat, the Sunday Times reported, citing a medic whose supervisor worked in the emergency department that treated the men.
The same mine in Yunnan province was subsequently studied by Shi Zhengli, an expert in SARS-like coronaviruses of bat origins at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Shi, nicknamed “bat woman" for her expeditions in bat caves, described Covid-19 in a February 2020 paper, saying it was 96.2% similar to a coronavirus sample named RaTG13 obtained in Yunnan in 2013.