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The headline overstates it: antibodies reactive to the virus were found earlier than expected. But not the virus itself. That may mean that the virus was sprea
by petertodd 6y ago
The headline overstates it: antibodies reactive to the virus were found earlier than expected. But not the virus itself.
That may mean that the virus was spreading earlier than thought. It may mean a closely related virus was spreading that generated cross-reactive antibodies (which we already know is happening with different antibodies). It may mean that COVID-19 was spreading, but later mutated into something more virulent. We just don't know yet.
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoWith the risk of repeating Sagan's "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", is it feasible at all that these results could be due to contamination/measurement/analysis error?
- petertodd 6y agoI'm no expert on the biology. But AFAIK there's no _universal_ contamination source that would be screwing up all these tests, as they're various forms of antibody reactivity tests. This isn't like PCR testing where trace amounts of the virus cause false positives. OTOH, as I said, it certainly doesn't prove by itself that the antibodies came from COVID infections.
- jjeaff 6y agoWasn't there also a case of old samples from a sewer system in Italy having sars-cov-2? I read that it could have been an error as well, bit never heard if there was a follow-up.