zlacker

Exactly. There was an outbreak in a deserted mine in South China in the early 2000's, 6 cleaning workers got seriously ill with symptoms similar to current Corona. See e.g. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815...

The leader of the Wuhan team went there with a team to collect samples and animals. In the early days of Covid, those samples were re-examined and it turned out that the genome of the Covid strain was very similar to the Covid 19 virus. So the conclusion was taken that those bats must have been the origin where Corona somehow started. Somehow nobody at that time thought much about the fact that those samples were kept in Wuhan, exactly where the outbreak started.

>>misja1+(OP)
Also,this sars cov-2 virus will not infect bats. That really hurts the 'it came from the bats' theory.

>>swader+J3
That’s not how viruses work.

>>swader+J3
Define "will not infect bats".

Bats have a very unusual immune system in that they can harbor viruses without the virus killing the bat or the bat killing the virus.

It's one of the things that makes them ferociously good incubators for a cross-species mammalian plague. The other things are that they fly (so can cover larger distances than most mammals) and have communal living (so can transmit to each other very readily).

>>swader+J3
Similarly, humans can't impregnate chimpanzees. That really hurts the "humans evolved from apes" theory

>>__s+FG
Since this is a common misconception, I'll note that humans didn't evolve from apes or chimpanzees. We share a relatively close common ancestor with them.

>>anikan+6N
Ape is a broad enough term (& fuzzy) that depending on context humans could be considered included or excluded from the category, meanwhile chimps & that common ancestor do fit into the category

Hence I didn't say we evolved from chimpanzees, even though it'd've suited the snow clone better