Thought of the Day - July 6 - Oh Shi-ooot

A couple of weeks I wrote a note about the mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 (https://clifffraser0.wixsite.com/covid-19/post/thought-of-the-day-june-17-the-search-for-the-source). But now the plot thickens.

Spanish virologists have found traces of SARS-CoV-2 in a sample of Barcelona wastewater collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought.

The University of Barcelona team, first found the virus was present in Barcelona on Jan. 15, 2020, 41 days before the first case was officially reported there. Then they ran tests on samples taken between January 2018 and December 2019 and found the presence of the virus genome in one of them, collected on March 12, 2019. “The levels of SARS-CoV-2 were low but were positive,” research leader Albert Bosch was quoted as saying by the university.

In mid-June, Italian scientists also said that they had found traces of coronavirus in sewage samples there taken in mid-December of last year in Milan and Turin. "This research may help us understand the beginning of virus circulation in Italy,” Giuseppina La Rosa, an expert in environmental wastewater at the Italian National Institute of Health who co-led the research, said in a statement detailing the findings.

Small studies conducted by scientific teams in the Netherlands, France, Australia, and elsewhere have found signs that the virus that causes COVID-19 can be detected in sewage, and many countries are beginning to use wastewater sampling to track the spread of the disease. The B.C. Centre for Disease Control has a pilot project to test BC wastewater for evidence of COVID-19. For now, researchers have been drawing samples from Vancouver and Surrey but with less than 200 confirmed cases province-wide, they haven't found any trace of COVID-19 yet. But as we go into a second wave, we could use it for communities that can't access testing easily and we could potentially be alerted to significant outbreaks before a spike in hospitalization. That said, BC officials say they won't have a better understanding of collected data until the fall.

While this latest finding from Spain has yet to be "peer-reviewed", it could prove to be an interesting development in the search for the source. However, this work has already highlighted the benefit of wastewater testing.

Cheers

Cliff