BillyBostickson Authors Elisabeth Bik 💉 2/2
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Several people asked me to say something about this rather fantastical claim, that SARS-CoV-2 might already have been lurking in Barcelona sewers in March 2019.
TLDR: There is no solid evidence for this, just a possible false-positive/cross reactive RT-PCR. /
The link that Reuters provided in their tweet is not working, but here is the correct link:
https://t.co/kY4CWLkytG
It is not a simple press release, but appears to have involved several journalists doing an investigation.
The Reuters article does mention that the results might be a bit preliminary. A scientist not involved with the study is quoted saying that it was "early to draw definitive conclusions". The authors however appear convinced that the finding was true.
So let's take a look at the preprint. This study has not been peer reviewed. It is a preprint on MedRxiv, so it needs to be interpreted this with extreme caution.
Reuters does not provide the link (why not?) but I did the searching for you.
The study's initial intent was to see if the virus could be detected in Barcelona wastewater during the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, and it was indeed found starting in Jan 2020. That is cool, because wastewater screening is a nice surveillance method to sample a whole city.
TLDR: There is no solid evidence for this, just a possible false-positive/cross reactive RT-PCR. /
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 says\xa0https://t.co/Ksl0slUnh5 pic.twitter.com/8XHm97rLV2
— Reuters World (@ReutersWorld) June 26, 2020
The link that Reuters provided in their tweet is not working, but here is the correct link:
https://t.co/kY4CWLkytG
It is not a simple press release, but appears to have involved several journalists doing an investigation.
The Reuters article does mention that the results might be a bit preliminary. A scientist not involved with the study is quoted saying that it was "early to draw definitive conclusions". The authors however appear convinced that the finding was true.
So let's take a look at the preprint. This study has not been peer reviewed. It is a preprint on MedRxiv, so it needs to be interpreted this with extreme caution.
Reuters does not provide the link (why not?) but I did the searching for you.
The study's initial intent was to see if the virus could be detected in Barcelona wastewater during the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, and it was indeed found starting in Jan 2020. That is cool, because wastewater screening is a nice surveillance method to sample a whole city.