Madrid. A team of Spanish virologists found traces of the new coronavirus in a Barcelona wastewater sample collected in March 2019, nine months before Covid-19 disease was identified in China, the University of Barcelona said yesterday.
The research is pending to be reviewed by other colleagues. The discovery of the presence of the virus genome so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply that the disease could have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought.
The team at the University of Barcelona, which had been analyzing the wastewater since mid-April 2020 to identify possible new outbreaks, also decided to test older samples.
The group of experts first found that the virus was present in Barcelona on January 15, 2020 for the first time, 41 days before the first case was officially registered in Barcelona.
They then carried out tests with 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, “in which the SARS-CoV-2 levels were low but positive, ”said research leader Albert Bosch.
“All the samples were negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes except for that of March 12, 2019, in which the SARS-CoV-2 levels were very low but were clearly positive by PCR and Furthermore, using two different targets, ”said the expert in a press release from the University of Barcelona.
Dr. Joan Ramón Villalbí, member of the board of the Spanish Society of Public Health and Health Administration, told Reuters that it was still early to draw definitive conclusions.
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