China May Not Have Been the Original Source of COVID-19, But Instead Sewage?

COVID-19 may have been lying inactive globally until it developed under favorable environments, instead of having originally come from China. This has been what an expert claims.

The Science Focus indicated in an article posted that Center for Evidence-Based Medicine's Dr. Tom Jefferson from Oxford University, has cited a string of recent findings of the presence of the said virus globally before its emergence in Asia as "growing evidence of its real origin" as a worldwide organism awaiting favorable settings to surface finally.

Recent reports said hints of COVID-19 had been discovered in sewage samples that came from three countries, specifically in "Brazil, Italy, and Spain, which precede its discovery in China."

Preprint research which did not go through peer review, claims, it has discovered the COVID-19 genomes' existence in a sewage sample from Barcelona from mid-March 2019. 

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Similar to What Happened with the 1918 Spanish Flu

Dr. Jefferson, in his The Daily Telegraph interview, has called for a further examination of the manner and reasons the virus appears to flourish in specific settings such as food factories and meatpacking plants.

Like Dr. Jefferson, Carl Heneghan, CEBM director Professor also thinks, this could perhaps, expose new routes for transmission like, through the sewage system or common toilet facilities. 

Heneghan explained through the paper that strange thins similar to this also "happened with Spanish Flu in 1918." 

The Spanish Flu claimed the lives of around 30 percent of the populace of West Samoa, and they reportedly did not have any physical contact with the outside world. It is assumed, though, that the said outbreak reached the island nation in 1918, in the Talune cargo ship.

Jefferson explained that the explanation for such an occurrence could be "that these agents don't arrive and go anywhere." He added, they always stay, and something is igniting them.

Such ignition, the Oxford professor added, may probably be "human density or environmental conditions," and this, he continued, "Is what we should look for."

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Earlier Discoveries 

Recently, Brazil reported having found the virus in the sewage samples in Florianopolis in November 2019. Furthermore, Spanish researchers discovered the virus in samples they took in March last year, from waster collected in Barcelona. 

The said researchers' Italian counterparts also discovered traces of COVID-19 in December, specifically in the sewage of Milan and Turin. 

The said traces of COVID-19 were tracked a couple of months earlier than they were officially recorded and reported.

As earlier mentioned, as bunches of the said virus developed in meatpacking plants and food factories, both Heneghan and Jefferson believe that the new transmission routes could be transferred via the sewage system or common toilet facilities.

Because of this, the two experts said that there is somewhat a lot of proof that massive "amounts of virus in sewage are spread everywhere." There is also growing evidence that there is "fecal spread."

There's a high level of concentration where sewage is at four degrees. This, the two experts explained, "is the ideal temperature for the virus" to be stabled and probably triggered.

Meatpacking plants, Heneghan and Jefferson said, are most of the time, at four degrees, and that explains why COVID-19 is likely to flourish in places like this.

And as a result, these two experts have called out researchers to further the ecology of COVID-19 saying, such outbreaks should be investigated appropriately with "people on the ground, one by one."

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