BARCELONA: Researchers at the University of Barcelona, one of Spain’s most prestigious universities, had detected the presence of the novel coronavirus in wastewater samples collected here on March 12, 2019, the university said in a statement on Friday.

“These results, sent to a high-impact journal and published in the archive medRxiv, suggest the infection was present before knowing about any case of Covid-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) in any part of the world,” the statement said.