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.
www.reuters.com
Researchers in Barcelona examining archived frozen samples of sewage ( Where do you sign up for that job!?) found signs of Sars Cov 2 virus in March 2019.
This dates to the first identification in a ?human source. Raises a big pile of questions. Like how come there wasn't an outbreak in Barcelona if people were shedding the virus a whole year before it hit Europe?
Or was there?
Ok, so these are the numbers from Barcelona. 2018, 2019 and 2020 are marked with arrows.
2019 was not a year with an unusually big number of influenza like cases. 2018 was worse, 2015 and 2016 were about the same. So, where was Coronavirus hiding? Why didn't people get sick?
It seems very unlikely that a virus this infectious would appear in Spain, go underground for a YEAR, travel round the world, and then pop up in Wuhan. Where could it be coming from?
“All samples were negatives regarding the SARS-CoV-2 genome presence except for March 12, 2019, in which the levels of SARS-CoV-2 were low but were positive, using two different targets”, says the researcher.
The sample only yielded a positive test for ONE week.
The result could be consistent with a small group or single traveller, not in an infectious phase but still excreting faecal virus. Nobody would get the respiratory illness, but the test would find it. That implies that Sars Cov 2 is
not native to Barcelona. Did the traveller/s leave? Did the virus stop being passed? We cannot tell, nor can we detemine the source of the illness. But we do have an important clue - the infected person must have caught it in late Winter, and travelled to Spain in spring. That implies that coronavirus was active
somewhere last year in the Winter.
Was it in China?
Well, here is an article
Why Is Flu Mortality Low in China? - Number of influenza deaths reported in world’s populous country each year pale in comparison to U.S., European figures
www.caixinglobal.com
- and the author explains tha tthe 2018-2019 flu season has a surprizingly low number of deaths because basically, they just do not count them. But the article does have the case numbers. So some more digging and....
Gee, it's kinda DIFFERENT to Barcelona, isn't it?
This statistic shows the influenza incidence rate in China from 2015 to 2021.
www.statista.com
Edit:
This raises ANOTHER pile of questions.
It was in China one year before they detected it, it seems, and infected people were evidently going to Europe with it.
Why did this outbreak not occur sooner? Why did it disappear in China, and then return in Dec-2019-Jan-2020? Was this really Covid, because this is not how it's behaving now.
www.cnn.com
news.sky.com
