Covid-19 in Spain 16 months ago??

This is not a sound-the-alarm thread. But the idea that the virus currently plaguing the world was bobbing around in the sewers of Spain nearly a full year before the outbreak in China is fascinating, if confirmed.

Indeed, if confirmed, I think the finding opens up the question whether the virus actually originated in China at all -- a notion that itself does not, I think, have any real hard evidence behind it, though maybe someone here knows of a study that I don't.

The story:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science/coronavirus-traces-found-in-march-2019-sewage-sample-spanish-study-shows-idUSKBN23X2HQ

The first few paragraphs:

MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish virologists have found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China, the University of Barcelona said on Friday.

The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought.

The University of Barcelona team, who had been testing waste water since mid-April this year to identify potential new outbreaks, decided to also run tests on older samples.

They first found the virus was present in Barcelona on Jan. 15, 2020, 41 days before the first case was officially reported there.

Then they ran tests on samples taken between January 2018 and December 2019 and found the presence of the virus genome in one of them, collected on March 12, 2019.

“The levels of SARS-CoV-2 were low but were positive,” research leader Albert Bosch was quoted as saying by the university.

Hazard a guess at inadvertent contamination of the sample.

@deepthought said
Hazard a guess at inadvertent contamination of the sample.

Chinese bats living in the sewers of Spain?

Sounds like a good cartoon.

@deepthought said
Hazard a guess at inadvertent contamination of the sample.