zlacker

Related: Scientists found SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in US blood samples taken from December 2019 to January 2020

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...

Edit: removed incorrect conclusion

>>jchook+(OP)
That's not what is suggests: "These findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may have been introduced into the United States prior to January 19, 2020."

Without Chinese data the origin will remain a mystery.

>>jchook+(OP)
Studies have shown that it was circulating in France back in November 2019. Not saying it originated there, there’s no indication of that, but there is a possibility that it had already been spreading for some time before December 2019.

>>kergon+L1
The “detected in Barcelona sewer water in March 2019” stories from June 2020 didn’t seem to go anywhere either.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...

Kept searching for followups, didn’t see anything till this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...

That’s from 21 January 2021 and says:

“So far unpublished data, analysing retained wastewater samples from Barcelona, Spain, taken in March 2019 showed positive RT-qPCR results for SARS-CoV-2 (Chavarria-Miró et al., 2020). The authors conclude that the virus was introduced to the Barcelona population due to global travel and remained undetected.”

So as of then, still unpublished.

>>Terret+JS
Yeah what I have seen about the Barcelona samples was not very convincing at the time, but then I am not an epidemiologist and I’d be happy to read more.

The French study has just been published last week [0]. It is based on a vast cohort study in which serum samples were collected regularly. They tested older samples and found some anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The article also mentions an Italian study with similar results [1].

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00716-2

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755