[bb2018]

I'm a bit confused. That article doesn't mention viruses at all in its abstract, only bacterial studies.

My understanding is that the virus came from horseshoe bats. These largely live in Southern China. Wuhan is not Southern China. All studies of Corona viruses I can find deal with going to southern China (because that's where horseshoe bats live) to collect samples from horsehoe bats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563315/

Do you have a non-paywalled version to the link you provided? It says they looked at bacteria in bats in the abstract but didn't mention anything about which species of bats.

[sudosysgen]

I can't give you a non-paywalled link legally, but there are actually Shortridge horseshoe bats in Hubei.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortridge%27s_horseshoe_bat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubei

You can see that Hubei is indeed in the area where horseshoe bats are found.