In December 2019, clusters of pneumonia cases started show-ing up in the Hubei region of China, especially in its largestcity Wuhan. As these piled up, researchers at the ChineseAcademy of Sciences’ laboratories and the Chinese Centrefor Disease Control started looking for the cause. This turnedout to be a new virus, whose genetic sequence matched veryclosely with two coronaviruses isolated from bats in China in2018.
