Puzzling study detects coronavirus in Spain wastewater from March 2019

• A different type of coronavirus testing can help researchers determine when the novel virus arrived in a community.
• Researchers from Spain studied wastewater samples from Barcelona going back to January 2018 and found evidence of the novel coronavirus in samples from March 2019.
• The discovery is puzzling, given the characteristics of COVID-19 outbreaks. The highly contagious respiratory illness would have ravaged Barcelona several months before the Wuhan epidemic, but that did not happen.

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The origins of the novel coronavirus are still a mystery, as China still hasn't revealed the source of the disease. A few weeks ago, officials from Wuhan went on record again to say the disease had not escaped from the infamous local lab, while others said the Wuhan market wasn't the place where it all started.

Separately, researchers from various countries have been able to prove that COVID-19 hit communities well before the first cases were officially confirmed by PCR tests. Doctors in France found patients that had COVID-19-like symptoms back in November 2019 and detected the virus in frozen samples from a different patient that was treated in a hospital for flu-like symptoms in late December 2019. Italian doctors said their first COVID-19 cases must have dated back to January, while other Italian researchers found coronavirus traces in wastewater from two major northern towns dating back to mid-December. US studies said the first COVID-19 patients may have been infected in late December, and that sustained community transmission had started even earlier than previous estimates. A different study that looked at mapping data for Wuhan hospitals found unusual parking lot activity in August and September of 2019.

All these pieces of evidence seem to suggest that the pandemic may have started spreading in Wuhan long before December. In fact, at the time, people in other countries were apparently already infected. But the most puzzling study to date reveals the coronavirus was present in wastewater in Barcelona, Spain dating back to March 2019.

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Puzzling study detects coronavirus in Spain wastewater from March 2019 originally appeared on BGR.com on Mon, 29 Jun 2020 at 19:05:19 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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