A recent study from the University of Barcelona suggested that traces of Covid-19 had been found in wastewater samples as early as March 2019.
Tom Jefferson, Honorary Principal Investigator of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, has suggested that the coronavirus may have been in an “inactive” stage.
He told the Daily Telegraph: “We may be seeing a latent virus that has been triggered by environmental conditions.”
Professor Jefferson referred to a case that had been detected in the Falkland Islands in early February of this year, and another in which a cruise ship full of people who had initially been detected by the virus experienced an outbreak mid-voyage.
He said: “The explanation for this could only be that these agents are not going or going anywhere. They are always here and something turns them on, perhaps human density or environmental conditions, and this is what we should be looking for. ”
Melita Vujnovic, the representative of the World Health Organization in Russia, told the RIA Novosti news agency that she could not “exclude” the theory of COVID-19 that existed before the pandemic broke out.
“The WHO has established a large team that will work together with Chinese scientists to analyze the origin of the virus.
“This virus lived in animals and at some point passed to humans. It is difficult to say when and where this happened. Is being investigated. Viruses can be found in wastewater. But nothing can be said specifically. “
Offering an alternative view, James Wood, Head of the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, said the idea that the virus had been inactive was “weak.”
Instead, he claimed that COVID-19 had been present in animals earlier than humans, but there was a period of time before it could spread.
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The study states: “This surprising finding indicates the circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any case of COVID-19 worldwide.
“Barcelona is a center of business and commerce, as well as a popular place for massive events, which gathers visitors from many parts of the world.
“However, similar situations are likely to have occurred in other parts of the world, with the circulation of unnoticed COVID-19 cases in the community.”
But some observers have questioned whether what they detected was actually coronavirus.
A user on the site of the medical journal MedRxiv doubted that the genes of the detected virus, named ‘E’ and ‘N’ in the study, actually matched those of COVID-19.
They wrote: “The authors do not detect SARS-CoV-2 in samples from March 2019. Rather, they detect IP2 / IP4 that resembles SARS-CoV-2. Whatever the virus, it does not have the SARS-CoV-2’s E and N1 / N2. “
Other observers claim that the test samples may have been accidentally contaminated with existing COVID-19 traces during laboratory handling.
