Inside China’s exhaustive search for COVID-positive animals that don’t exist

It’s been a fruit-less bat search.

China has tested more than 50,000 animals, including thousands of bats, to find evidence of COVID-19’s origins — amid a renewed international focus on whether the virus actually leaked from a laboratory. Studies started soon after the first case was officially registered in Wuhan in December 2019, with the local wet market soon closed down and eyed as a likely source for the contagion that has now killed more than 3.5 million people worldwide.