> It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. This is true but misleading. It took a long time to

> It took something like 15 years to find the bat population likely to have been the source of SARS-CoV-1. This is true but misleading. It took a long time to find the reservoir host (i.e., the animal in which most of the virus evolved) for SARS-1, but the proximal host (i.e., the animal that actually infected the first humans) was found within about a year. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/01/who-sees-more-evidence-civet-role-sars https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2004/01/who-sees... Based on the WIV's pre-pandemic research, we knew immediately that the reservoir host of SARS-CoV-2 is bats. We still haven't found the proximal host. It's almost certainly not pangolins, and Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-history https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-his...