Did SARS-CoV-2 appear in some (Mojiang) Chinese miners in 2012?

Question

The N.Y. Post wrote in August 2020:

In April 2012, six miners in the Mojiang mine in southwestern China’s Yunnan province fell ill after spending more than 14 days removing bat feces. Three eventually died.

In his thesis, the physician Li Xu, who treated the miners, describes how the patients had a high fever, a dry cough, sore limbs and, in some cases, headaches — all symptoms now associated with COVID-19, said Latham and Wilson.

How the miners were treated — for example, with ventilation and a variety of drugs including steroids, blood thinners and antibiotics — also resembles how COVID-19 patients are being treated worldwide, they said. [...]

The doctor also sent sample tissues from the miners to the Wuhan lab, a focal point of coronavirus research in China. There, scientists found the source of infection was a SARS-like coronavirus from a Chinese rufous horseshoe bat, according to the thesis.

Latham and Wilson believe the virus — once inside the miners — “evolved” into SARS CoV-2, “an unusually pathogenic coronavirus highly adapted to humans,” and the samples somehow escaped from the lab last year, launching what has morphed into the coronavirus pandemic.

The Federalist has a longer piece which contains an interview with one of the authors (Latham) of the original piece and it says quoting him

Our proposition is quite simple — that the hospital sent samples to Wuhan from the miners and what evolved inside the miners was SARS-CoV-2.

And likewise the very long original article eventually gets to:

We suggest, first, that inside the miners RaTG13 (or a very similar virus) evolved into SARS-CoV-2, an unusually pathogenic coronavirus highly adapted to humans. Second, that the Shi lab used medical samples taken from the miners and sent to them by Kunming University Hospital for their research. It was this human-adapted virus, now known as SARS-CoV-2­, that escaped from the WIV in 2019.

If the virus was identified (as a coronavirus) in 2012 and it's exactly SARS-CoV-2 as opposed some relative, why was the SARS-CoV-2 sequence unknown (to the wider scientific) until it [re]emerged in Wuhan 8 years later? Something doesn't quite add up here, even with China's bureaucracy penchant for covering up bad news.

Answer 1

According to a Nov 17, 2020 "addendum" paper by Shi et al. published in Nature, the conserved serum samples from those miners were recently retested and do not test positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies:

Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum samples collected from 4 patients (one of whom was deceased) who showed severe respiratory disease. These patients had visited a mine cave in Tongguan town, Mojiang County, Yunnan Province, China, to clean bat faeces in order to mine copper before being admitted to the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University on 26–27 April 2012. The samples we received were collected by the hospital staff in June, July, August and September 2012. To investigate the cause of the respiratory disease, we tested the samples using PCR methods developed in our laboratory targeting the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RdRp) of Ebola virus, Nipah virus and bat SARSr-CoV Rp3, and all of the samples were negative for the presence of these viruses. We also tested the serum samples for the presence of antibodies against the nucleocapsid proteins of these three viruses, and none of the samples gave a positive result. Recently, we retested the samples with our validated enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) against the SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) nucleocapsid protein—which has greater than 90% amino acid sequence identity with bat SARSr-CoV Rp3—and confirmed that these patients were not infected by SARS-CoV-2.

The next (and last) para recounts how RaTG13 was discovered, but this was basically from the mine, not from the miners.

Of course, it would be more useful if they had e.g. bronchoalveolar samples conserved (from the miners) on which one could a PCR rather than ELISA (antibodies tests) on serum samples.