A May-2013 Kunming Medical University master’s thesis, “The Analysis of Six Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown Viruses,” by the physician who treated six miners hospitalized after shovelling bat guano in a copper mineshaft in Mojiang County, Yunnan, in April 2012 (three of the six died). Concludes a SARS-like coronavirus from horseshoe bats was the likely cause, and records that serum samples from four miners were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where IgG/IgM antibody testing returned some positive results. The thesis sat unnoticed on cnki.net until independent researchers surfaced and translated it in 2020-21.
relevance_note: Primary clinical record underlying the Mojiang-miners narrative and the documentary link between that mine, WIV sampling, and the RaTG13 sample (see companion Nature-addendum node).