Novel coronavirus was found in sewage from Barcelona in the first few months before reporting the first terrible disease in China, a team of Spanish researchers said.

Scientists from the enterovirus group at the University of Barcelona first detected the virus in frozen samples of the city's wastewater on March 12, 2019. A team led by Rosa Maria pint ó and Albert Bosch is exploring the potential of the virus. The waste water analysis in the early warning system and the prevention of the future outbreak of covid-19 have made amazing discoveries.

Initially, the team found the virus in a sample on January 15, 2020, about 41 days before the first confirmed case of covid-19 in Spain. They decided to examine samples from January 2018 to December 2019, and all of them proved negative. "Except for samples from March 12, 2019, the level of sars-cov-2 is very low, but it is obviously positive," they said in a statement, referring to the virus by its official name.

The researchers concluded that the virus may have spread around the world earlier than originally thought.

"Barcelona receives a lot of tourists for tourism or professional reasons," Bosch said. "The rest of the world is likely to have a similar situation."

The team believes that some early cases of covid-19 may be mistaken for severe influenza. Although the study was published in medrxiv database, it has not been peer-reviewed so far, but it has been widely reported in Spanish media (e.g. El Mundo daily).

The virus has spread almost all over the world, infecting more than 9 million people and killing nearly 500000 people. Scientists hypothesized that it originated in December 2019 in a humid market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

A novel coronavirus case was first recorded in France in January 2020. However, various studies since then have posed challenges. The Italian study also focused on sewage analysis, which showed traces of the virus could be traced back to mid December 2019 in samples from Milan and Turin.