A Nature-solicited addendum to Zhou/Shi et al.’s original Feb-2020 RaTG13 paper. It discloses, for the first time in the peer-reviewed record, that RaTG13 is the same sample WIV catalogued as “RaBtCoV/4991” in 2013, collected from the Mojiang mineshaft where, in April 2012, six miners fell ill with severe pneumonia (three died) after clearing bat guano — a link the original 2020 paper had not mentioned. It also states WIV had obtained a near-full-length RaTG13 sequence already by 2018, contradicting the earlier paper’s implication that the genome was newly sequenced in early 2020.
relevance_note: The WIV team’s own peer-reviewed acknowledgment that its closest-known-relative sample had an undisclosed history tied to a 2012 pneumonia cluster, and that the genome had been in hand roughly two years before the pandemic.