According to Shi Zhengli, an expert on SARS-like coronaviruses, the coronavirus bears stark resemblance with the frozen samples of bat virus that were sent to Wuhan Institute of Virology, collected from an abandoned bat cave in China's Yunnan province
While the study could not directly confirm that the dramatic increase in hospital traffic is due to coronavirus, it gave credence to the hypothesis that the outbreak of the pandemic may have happened before its identification in the wet markets of Wuhan.