Merdeka.com – The University of Barcelona, Spain, announced on Friday that the virus experts on campus discovered traces of the corona virus (Sars-CoV-2) in a sewerage sample in Barcelona collected in March 2019, nine months before the Covid-19 pandemic began in Wuhan, China , in December 2019.
The discovery of this viral genome in Spain, if proven true, then shows that this disease has emerged earlier than previously thought by the scientific community.
Reporting from the Reuters page, Friday (6/27), a team from the University of Barcelona took samples of sewer water in mid-April this year to detect the possibility of a new outbreak. They then decided to take water samples also from previous years.
The team of scientists first discovered the corona virus in Barcelona on January 15, 2020, 41 days before the first case was reported in Spain.
They then tested the samples from January 2018 to December 2019 and found traces of the corona virus genome in one of the samples collected on March 12, 2019.
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They analyzed sewer freeze water from nine different days between January 2018 to December 2019. All samples were negative from the Sars-CoV-2 trail, except there were low levels in the samples found on March 12, 2019.
“The level of Sars-CoV-2 found was low but positive,” lead researcher Albert Bosch was quoted as saying by the university.
This research has been proposed to be reviewed by other fellow scientists.
Dr Joan Ramon Villalbi from the Spanish Public Health and Sanitation Society told Reuters, it was too early to draw definitive conclusions.
“When the findings are only obtained from one sample, then you will always need more data, more research, more samples to ensure and avoid errors that occur in the laboratory or methodological problems,” he said.
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