This early European spread hypothesis has been percolating throughout the pandemic, with a new paper supposedly showing evidence for it cropping up every few months. Every new paper has kicked off another in the chain, with all of them sharing a common theme: they are flawed, or rely on unusual methodology, and the majority are placing this early spread in Italy. “People are encouraging each other,” Worobey says. “It’s genuine that people there really are convinced that there was an early outbreak, and they’re going and looking for evidence of it, and perhaps not being very self-critical of the evidence that they’re generating.”

“I don’t see any motive, but I think they’re not independent of each other,” says Rambaut. “Because once this idea has caught hold, people then will go through their stored samples to see what they can find.”

Other studies reporting an earlier detection of the virus in Italy have similar flaws. A study published in August 2020, conducted by Rome’s Department of Environment and Health, reported detecting Sars-CoV-2 RNA in sewage samples taken on December 18, 2019, in the cities of Milan and Turin. These findings raised the suspicions of Alex Crits-Christoph, a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University who specialises in bioinformatic studies of genetic datas. The researchers ran three different tests, but only one came back positive. They also devised their own primers, which are used to target specific regions of RNA, despite there being standardised primers for Sars-CoV-2 in use across the world at the time. “That strikes me as a little bit odd,” he says.