Yet the discovery of this publication trail only deepened the mystery yet further. Though never mentioned by Ge et al., the ‘abandoned’ mine (which subsequently became known as the Mojiang mine) where BtCoV/4991 was found had recently been the site of a mystery disease outbreak. In April 2012, just two and a half months before the first WIV sampling trip, six miners had become sick and three of them had died. Indeed, the mine outbreak was presumably why the WIV researchers were sampling there (and the Zhou et al. addendum later confirmed this).

The nature of the 2012 disease outbreak became much clearer with the discovery (by an anonymous Twitter user called @TheSeeker268) of a 2013 Chinese Master’s thesis. This thesis is titled “The Analysis of Six Patients With Severe Pneumonia Caused By Unknown Viruses“. Its abstract specifically mentions a possible outbreak of SARS-like coronaviruses.

To learn more about the 2012 pneumonia outbreak, we arranged to have the Master’s thesis translated into English.

The translation yielded a cornucopia of information. This began with the fact that the author of the thesis was the doctor who supervised the testing and treatment of the miners at the First Affiliated hospital of Kunming Medical University (Yunnan Province).