Coronavirus may have been in Spain nine months before China’s first cases
New findings suggest the virus could have been circulating a year before the current pandemic began in December 2019, say sewage water researchers
Spanish virologists have found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona wastewater collected in March 2019.
This is nine months before COVID-19 was first identified in China, the University of Barcelona says.
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 team, who had been testing wastewater since mid-April this year to identify potential new outbreaks, decided to also run tests on older samples.
