"Shi Zheng-li — a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-fro...

Supposedly the lab then checked all their samples but didn't find an exact match - but i don't think that rules them out. For a start my understanding is that the closest match of 97% was with a coronavirus that Shi identified from a Yunan bat in 2015. Is it not plausible that the virus escaped sometime after that, lived in the community undetected, mutated, then exploded into what we've got today?

Below is another story confirming the previous report you posted where the SARS virus escaped a lab in Beijing - twice.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-beijing-lab-twice-50137