Coronavirus first appeared in Chinese miners back in 2012 and may not have come from Wuhan market, scientists say

COVID-19 may have originated in a Chinese mineshaft in 2012 – not a wet market in Wuhan.

Scientists believe the devastating virus, that has killed over 760,000 people worldwide, actually began 1,000 miles away from Wuhan’s shamed wet market.

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Eight years ago, six miners in the Mojiang mine in southwestern China’s Yunnan province fell ill with a pneumonia-like illness after spending 14 days removing bat faeces.

Tragically, three workers died from the illness.

Physician Li Xu, who treated the miners, describes how the patients had a high fever, a dry cough, sore limbs and, in some cases, headaches — all symptoms now associated with COVID-19, said Virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson.

Latham and Wilson who both work for the non-profit Bioscience Resource Project in Ithaca, read the thesis written by Chinese medical doctor who treated the miners.

“The evidence it contains has led us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Latham and Wilson wrote.

Latham told New York Post that the coronavirus “almost certainly escaped” from the Wuhan lab.

The evidence it contains has led us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic

The miners were also treated in a similar way to how Covid-19 sufferers are -with ventilation, blood thinners, steroids and antibiotics.

After the miners had tests for hepatitis, dengue fever and HIV, overseen by virologist Zhong Nanshan – the medical hero who managed the SARS outbreak in 2003.

The doctor sent sample tissues from the infected miners to the Wuhan lab, where many believed the virus was leaked from.

Scientists at the lab then found the source of infection was a SARS-like coronavirus from a Chinese rufous horseshoe bat.

Latham and Wilson believe that the virus evolved inside the miners, meaning it was highly adapted to humans.

Chinese officials still believe Covid-19 started in the wet market in Wuhan in December 2019.

But many scientists still question its origins after the market in question was cleaned up and shut down by officials as soon as the virus began spreading.

WET MARKET RUMOURS

This comes as a bubonic plague outbreak in China has seen the second victim die from the horror bug known as the “Black Death”.

The victim, who was from northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, died from multiple organ failure earlier this month, the Bayannao’er city health commission said on its website.

Another person from the same region died from the disease in Baotou, with the city then issuing level-three epidemic warnings.

The Bayannao’er, or Bayannur, commission has sealed off the area where the victim lived.

A total of seven close contacts of the deceased, who has not been named, have been placed under medical observation but all have tested negative for the plague and had no symptoms.