intermediate host (Reusken et al., 2013; Azhar et al., 2014). Similar to SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV is also an emerging zoonotic virus (Li and Du, 2019). Bats habituate several CoVs phylogenetically related to MERS-CoV, and some of them are identical to MERS-CoVs, suggesting that MERS-CoV may origi