I've only just spotted this. A couple of weeks ago the New Scientist contained a short article explaining that Zheng-Li Shi and her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had detected a coronavirus in bats in 2013 which it now transpires is 96% identical to COVID-19. Shi had shown that this virus could infect human cells in the lab. Furthermore in 2016 Wayne Marasco and colleagues at Harvard Medical School found that this virus could replicate in human airway cells. Further research was hampered by the US government's ban on work that alters viruses in ways that might make them more dangerous - an admirable goal but perhaps one that requires a certain amount of nuancing? Only last year Shi warned that it was highly likely that coronavirus outbreaks would originate in bats in China. She had earlier demonstrated that such viruses are capable of passing directly from bats to people living near their caves without the need for an intermediary species.
This only strengthens the case for more public money to be put towards research in this area.
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