Researchers in China say they have uncovered a new batch of coronaviruses in bats that resembles the COVID-19 virus that has swept the globe.

The researchers said they collected samples from small bats that lived in forests in the Yunnan province between May 2019 and November 2020.

"In total, we assembled 24 novel coronavirus genomes from different bat species, including four SARS-CoV-2 like coronaviruses," the researchers wrote in the journal Cell. .