A Wuhan lab posted a job advert looking for experts on virus transmission and bats just days before China reported an outbreak of the diesease.
The official website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) shows a recruitment notice looking to hire scientists for research.
The job advert was posted on December 24 last year, seven days before China officially declared an outbreak of Covid-19.
WIV is located is located just ten miles from the epicentre of the outbreak in Whuhon.
The laboratory, which is said to be the most advanced of its kind in China, listed other similar jobs back in November, including an advert for a researcher to investigate how viral outbreaks “reduce the harm caused by infectious diseases in humans”.
Another ad, listed on November 18, recruits a scientist to analyse how bats can carry coronavirus without developing a disease.
Early confirmed cases of coronavirus from Wuhan were revealed in December, but China's first victim may have caught the deadly disease in November, official government data shows.
According to the report seen by the South China Morning Post, the first patient to suffer from Covid-19 was recorded on November 17.
It was claimed earlier this year that a second lab in the city, thought to belong to WIV, was responsible for the outbreak of the deadly virus.
While the Chinese government said the outbreak started inside a wet market in Wuhan, scientists from South China University of Technology in Guangzhou said the possible origin of the virus could be from Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WCDC).
Scholars Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao published a research journal titled 'The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus' on Research Gate, where they claimed WCDC 'hosted animals in laboratories for research purposes', including 605 bats captured in the Hubei and Zhejiang provinces.
The report mentioned one researcher, known as JH Tian, 'was once attacked by bats' and that 'the blood of bat was on his skin'. He then quarantined himself for a total of 28 days after 'bats peed on him'.
But the theory has been criticised by other experts, who argue the most likely explanation for the outbreak is that bats transferred the virus to another mammal between 20 and 70 years ago.
Then the intermediary host, so far unidentified, passed the virus onto humans for the first time in Wuhan in late November or early December last year.
The lab is located 280 metres from the infamous wet market and adjacent to the Union hospital where the first group of doctors was infected.
It read: "It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study."
A second laboratory, located at approximately 12km from the wet market, was mentioned in the report, as it said: "This laboratory reported that the Chinese horseshoe bats were natural reservoirs for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) which caused the SARS outbreak in 2003."
Wuhan Institute of Virology is classified as P4, the highest level of biosafety laboratory.
