zlacker

Thanks for adding that. I didn't mean to come across as passive-aggressive.

So if I understand right. While SARS1 was found in civets within 4 months of it being discovered, we have recently (2017) also found it in Bats. Current Phylogenetic studies indicate that the Bats are more likely to have been the original reservoir.

>>screye+(OP)
Well we already guessed it came from bats first, we've just more recently found the probable progenitor virus in bats (still not sure if it was that exact virus or a sibling, but its very close).

And we found it in civets but that doesn't prove that humans caught it from civets, it could be the other way around, just like SARS-CoV-2 and the minks in Denmark.

The fact that WIV1 seems to infect humans also doesn't rule out the possibility that there might still be an intermediate animal like civets. It is suggestive that there's no need for an intermediate animal, but that doesn't prove anything either way.

So we found a similar virus in civets in 2003 and jumped to a conclusion very fast. We have also found that SARS-CoV-2 infects all kinds of other animals and have found it in them, but we assume most of them caught SARS-CoV-2 from humans due to the massive pandemic going on this time. The few viruses we found in e.g. pangolins don't seem to be similar enough to have passed from pangolins to humans or vice versa. The bat coronavirus we already knew about (RaTG13) is somewhat close but would have needed a decade or two to mutate into SARS-CoV-2.

So we can't say that much for certain about either SARS-1 or SARS-2 at this point, even though we're 18 years or so past SARS-1 we still don't have all the answers.