The virus has a close 96% sequence overlap to a naturally occurring bat coronavirus, and coronaviruses have been known to jump from bats to humans by way of intermediates before, like the SARS coronavirus. The differences between the genome sequences, including the ones identified by the Indian study, are in variable regions of the genome that we’d expect to differ, and the 4% difference in the genomes is hard to call as “high” or “low,” given that we don’t know exactly which bats the 2019-nCoV strain came from or when it diverged from its closest known ancestor.
