Coronavirus traces found in Spanish sewage from March 2019

Spanish researchers have found traces of the novel coronavirus in Barcelona wastewater collected in March 2019, nine months before COVID-19 was identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan. University of Barcelona virologists led by Albert Bosch had been monitoring wastewater since April of this year.

When they decided to test older samples, they said they found genetic material from the virus in one sample from March 12, 2019. The presence of the virus genome so early in Spain, if confirmed, would indicate the pathogen appeared much earlier than previously thought. In their not-yet-peer-reviewed paper posted on Friday on medRxiv, the researchers also said they found the virus in Barcelona wastewater from Jan. 15 of this year, 41 days before the first case was officially reported there.

Joan Ramon Villalbi of the Spanish Society for Public Health and Sanitary Administration said it was still early to draw definitive conclusions based on these findings. “When it’s just one result, you always want more data, more studies, more samples to confirm it and rule out a laboratory error or a methodological problem,” he said.

Reuters