I recall there being something about the virus being present in Europe earlier than previously thought, but I don't know about pre-Wuhan. I'm probably misremembering.
Yeah that's most likely gonna be retracted, seen nothing corroborating it, also just doesn't make sense for the virus to be circulating without spikes in deaths. So many wacky papers have been published, ran in the news cycle, then forgotten about. It's gonna take a year of peer review for the real stuff to float to the top and there be consensus.
I doubt it, it's so virulent that if it was present in a small number of people it would have kicked off mass spread. IMO the most likely thing is that since coronaviruses recombine very often compared to other virus families, that the tests for covid 19 are picking up other coronaviruses. Plus the genetically most similar viruses have been found to be bat viruses in nearby provinces to Wuhan. It also spread from a bat to pangolin then back to bats to humans very very recently, so it had to be somewhere with a pangolin population.
Didn't a research paper recently find the virus was circulating in Italy and France before the Wuhan outbreak?
I recall there being something about the virus being present in Europe earlier than previously thought, but I don't know about pre-Wuhan. I'm probably misremembering.
Did a lookup, this article says the Italian tests go back as far as September 2019. Wikipedia says the virus was first identified in December.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-italy-anitbodies-covid-study-b1723243.html
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Yeah that's most likely gonna be retracted, seen nothing corroborating it, also just doesn't make sense for the virus to be circulating without spikes in deaths. So many wacky papers have been published, ran in the news cycle, then forgotten about. It's gonna take a year of peer review for the real stuff to float to the top and there be consensus.
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I doubt it, it's so virulent that if it was present in a small number of people it would have kicked off mass spread. IMO the most likely thing is that since coronaviruses recombine very often compared to other virus families, that the tests for covid 19 are picking up other coronaviruses. Plus the genetically most similar viruses have been found to be bat viruses in nearby provinces to Wuhan. It also spread from a bat to pangolin then back to bats to humans very very recently, so it had to be somewhere with a pangolin population.
Here's a good thread of all the possible evidence of covid in europe before China's first confirmed case