First modification: 25/03/2021 – 13:30
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A study in wastewater from the tourist city of Florianopolis confirmed that the COVID 19 virus circulated freely in Brazil and unnoticed a month before the first official cases of sick from the new coronavirus in the Chinese city Wuhan.
Published by the magazine Science of the Total Environment The investigation found the presence of COVID between November 19 and 27, 2019, three months before the first infected was confirmed in the South American country.
Coordinated by the microbiology laboratory of the University of Burgos, in alliance with the Federal University of Santa Catarina, the research is the first description of the presence of RNA of the virus worldwide.
“This discovery in Florianópolis, together with other findings made in Paris, Milan and Barcelona, shows that the virus was circulating before we realized that we had a problem,” the coordinator of the investigation, Alfonso David Rodríguez, told Radio France International. Lazarus.
For this researcher, the finding does not affect what has been scientifically proven on the traceability of Sars-Cov-2: it is a virus of animal origin, not created in the laboratory, that directly or indirectly jumped to humans in the Chinese town from Wuhan.
The importance of wastewater
The research also shows the enormous interest of wastewater as an early warning tool for the non-invasive presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
“It is not an isolated case, says Rodriguez Lázaro and adds” Our study was done on wastewater and found that there were a large number of people who were excreting the virus in Florianópolis, Brazilian region of Santa Catarina, long before they were reported the first cases of contagion in Brazil ”.
Similarly, other studies have shown that the virus circulated in Spain, France or Italy before the first Covid-19 patients were detected in those countries.
The expert points out that, although it is a respiratory virus, a high number of patients present diarrhea as a symptom of the infection and the excretion of the virus is also very high: a patient can excrete up to one billion particles per thousand liters of diarrhea, he said. .
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A WHO Recommended Procedure
“This tool of looking at communities through the wastewater that contains excrement, instead of examining patient by patient, gives the image of the situation of the virus in general in a population, in a city or in a municipality.”
Given the important information provided by this type of research in wastewater, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Union (EU) propose that, before the end of 2021, surveillance plans be carried out in the that each week residual samples are collected and the times contained therein are examined.
Thanks to the “Diogenes complex” suffered by the scientists, wastewater from 2019 was stored in laboratory refrigerators for other investigations and which, when the pandemic arrived, served to carry out the virus RNA tracing investigation.
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