Coronavirus: unlikely clues to Covid-19 virus family found in Cambodia lab freezer, Thai drain pipe

BANGKOK, SCMP: A freezer cabinet on the ground floor of a Phnom Penh laboratory and an irrigation pipe in a wildlife sanctuary in Thailand are not the most obvious places to look for the origins of the virus that sparked the Covid-19 pandemic.

But both have offered clues. Stored away in a freezer at the Institut Pasteur in Cambodia – or Institut Pasteur du Cambodge – was a decade-old bat pathogen that counts as one of the closest known relatives to the Sars-CoV-2 virus now linked to the deaths of 2.5 million people worldwide.