zlacker

Non-scientists obviously go into bat caves all the time, for guano collection, mining, etc. This certainly is a possible pathway for the emergence of zoonotic diseases, including SARS-CoV-2. Those aren't the bat caves I was referring to, though.

The WIV and Wuhan CDC sent grad students to hike through the wilderness to remote bat caves too far from any road or farm to have been exploited yet for any practical use. They chose those caves based on their expert predictions of where they expected to see the greatest diversity of novel coronaviruses.

There's obviously far fewer WIV grad students than guano harvesters; but the risk per person seems orders of magnitude higher, for an expert deliberately seeking a virus vs. a merely indifferent laborer. So that seems like a new and non-negligible risk to me, and thus one that requires investigation. Note that I'm not alone in this; Marc Lipsitch, for example, often mentions this possible pathway.