Explainer-China's Mojiang mine and its role in the origins of COVID-19 - Yahoo! Voices
The mine is in Mojiang in southwest China, about 1,500 kilometres from Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first identified.According to the Wuhan Institute of Virology's Shi Zhengli, China's top bat coronavirus researcher, the workers' pneumonia-like symptoms were caused by a fungal infection.First identified in 2016, RaTG13 shares 96.2% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by Shi and other researchers early in February 2020, just weeks after the first COVID-19 cases had been identified in Wuhan.The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from the site.The paper concluded that "the experimental evidence cannot support" claims that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from the lab, and called for "more systematic and longitudinal sampling of bats, pangolins or other possible intermediate animals" to better understand where the pandemic originated.A report on the origins of Covid-19 by a US government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation, according to a report.