3 ms·

This seems like it must be a typo. March of 2019??? That doesn't compute at all.

• ancarda 6y ago
  It's not a typo. The article points out how early it is: >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, who had been testing waste water since mid-April this year to identify potential new outbreaks, decided to also run tests on older samples.
• a1369209993 6y ago
  It not a typo, it's a (single) incorrect test result, probably due to contamination, operator error, noise, or expected defects in testing supplys. (It might be some other coronavirus (there are plenty). It theoretically might be COVID-19, but as you note, that's incredibly unlikely.)
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  It's very unlikely to actually be COVID-19, but the sample was actually from March of 2019. Others have covered many of the ways it could be wrong, but things like this are important to point out when found if no clear (rather than suspected, unconfirmed) source of error can be identified because it provides indications for follow-up, and even things that are 99.9% likely to be error will indicate a surprising new piece of information 0.1% of the time, and if you ignore it, the world will miss those. OTOH, things this improbable to be correct get presented inaccurately and as far more likely to be correct (or as perceived by the scientific community as such) than they are, which helps foster “science fatigue” in the public.