According to La Vanguardia and other media reports, researchers at the University of Barcelona (UB) have found the remains of the virus SARS-CoV-2 in samples collected in the sewers of Barcelona on March 12, 2019. Surprisingly, knowing that the pandemic was declared just a year later and that the disease officially started in December 2019 in China, with the theory approved by most experts, moving from wild animals to humans in the market of the city of Wuhan.

The researchers of the UB have taken weekly samples of water from the sewerage system of the Catalan capital, with the certainty that in the bathrooms they would find genomes of viruses and other pathogens in the tanks abandoned by humans. In view of the results of the study, the team coordinator, the professor of microbiology and president of the Spanish Society of Virology, Albert Bosch, undoubtedly believes that the genomes of SARS-CoV-2 have been detected in the samples of March 2019. That would mean that by that time the virus was circulating around the world and doctors confused its symptoms with those of other known illnesses, such as the flu.

“This surprising finding,” Mr Bosch said, shows that the virus was circulating in Barcelona before COVID-19 was confirmed anywhere else in the world. Barcelona is an important business and shopping center, as well as massive events that bring people from all over the world together. Similar situations may have occurred in other parts of the world." It is significant that in March 2019, the Mobile trade fair was held in Barcelona, one of the most important in the world in the field of new technologies.

The value of the research has been immediately questioned by other experts who believe that the UB has drawn excessive conclusions with too small evidence: that they have used techniques of limited reliability, that the genetic content of the samples analysed was very low... Given the lack of an echo that has had since the publication of the study of the UB, these doubts seem to have prevailed. However, the acceptance of the scientific community after the full publication of the study reveals the degree of credibility it has.

The research work of the UB is on the corset of other information that question the thesis that COVID-19 was created at the Wuhan fair in November and December 2019. Several doctors in northern Italy had already practiced in their region the suspicion that the coronavirus had occurred before it officially appeared, because they had found among several patients a very severe and peculiar pneumonia. Later, the head of resuscitation of a hospital in Paris confirmed with evidence that, in France, at least on 27 December, a patient was treated by coronavirus, well before the declaration of the pandemic. And, although less has been mentioned, in the summer of 2019 there were especially virulent and earlier flu in the U.S. state of Maryland than usual, with symptoms similar to COVID-19.

This leads some experts to say that the majority thesis that the COVID-19 pandemic has occurred in China and only in China, it cannot be said with certainty that SARS-CoV-2 has naturally passed in the Wuhan fair to humans, and that it must be analyzed alongside it by the experiments that humans can perform in virus laboratories.