I can’t find the link but the virus they took from sick miners to study and what is now called covid-19 were 95-99% the same. A fellow did their masters thesis on it in 2016 or so
Couple of clarifications. (The fact that the term 'Mojiang' does not show up in the comments yet is telling about where awareness currently is on the topic).
1. RaTG13 came from the copper mine in Mojiang in 2013. (The TG in RaTG13 refers to TongGuan, a township in Mojiang, all per Shi Zhengli's accounting of the sequence's provenance).
2. Prior to which and also in 2013, six miners in this same Mojiang mine came down deftly ill with a respiratory illness. Three of them died from their illness.
3. One report on their cases says they had IgM antibodies to SARS. Another report says they had IgG.
4. There's been no data to support Shi Zhengli's assertion that they died of a fungal infection. (That said, independent of her account, there is a background precedent that there have been examples of people who have had strong fungal infections from exposure to bat guano in certain caves).
5. Shi Zhengli's team returned to the same Mojiang cave again and again to sample for viruses from the mine's bats and rodents. (Goal for this and the broad purpose of her teams' research is to demonstrate for pandemic prevention purposes which viruses are evolutionarily close enough to be able to hop to humans).
Multiple coronaviruses gathered from this mine remain unpublished, despite a year into the pandemic and an entire WHO-convened study group to Wuhan.
https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1372383456081027076?s=...
(source: Bloom Lab of Fred Hutch Institute)
If you're interested in learning more, I would highly recommend following members of the Washington Post-cited DRASTIC team.
The DRASTIC folks, some of them postdocs themselves, have been at this for a year, gathering & archiving evidence like the case reports described above (that unsurprisingly typically become scrubbed from the source after getting brought to light).
The twitter hashtag #DRASTIC is a reasonable place to start.
