Villagers had gotten sick when the 2015 specimen that seems to be the closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 was collected -- and while they were similar, previous "viral tree attempts" had placed both the 2015 bat specimen and SARS-CoV-2 to each have a common ancestor, not as descendants of each other.
Nextstrain, after a year now of tracking known COVID-19 infections and how the virus mutates, have backed up the earliest potential emergence date for SARS-CoV-2 (essentially, when it started infecting humans and having to deal with a human immune system) as late September.
Of course, without knowing exactly how they're studying these viruses we *can't* know what happened. I just know that humans move, and humans often move animals with them, and people usually move animals from rural areas towards cities and not the other direction.
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Of course, I am also always inclined to remember our own country's near-miss -- a strain of Ebola near DC, which they determined to be capable of spreading via droplets/aerosols (monkeys in other rooms of the quarantine center were getting sick too). Workers tested positive, showing that the virus was capable of infecting us long enough to generate antibodies, even if it didn't cause illness or linger.
Right now it doesn't seem to be nearly as lethal to monkeys as Ebola or SHF, which in a way, made it even more dangerous, and a good thing that the perception of danger/need for investigation was higher because of a co-existing SHF outbreak in the same facility. Without that SHF infection, we might never have discovered it.
Since it has been since discovered at many primate quarantine and/or breeding centers, and once in pigs that lived near the presumed reservoir of the virus, and in a human who was taking care of said pigs (no human-to-human transmission known yet). We now know to test to look for this fucker that could hide and eventually get a sustained transmission capacity between humans. And Ebola that can spread through an AC system is kinda our country's worst nightmare, even if it's a reduced-fatality version of Ebola.
We got lucky. If we hadn't gotten lucky, we'd have certainly been investigated by the international community because of the proximity of Reston to the US military virology lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
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