I believe you’re referring to an article published at the Anti Empire website where a scientist from Oxford University was claiming that viruses do tend to lay dormant and emerge only when conditions permit or encourage their emergence.

The scientist also claimed that Spanish researchers had found the virus in samples of sewage as early as March 2019.

One very interesting thing he said was that in the 1918 flu pandemic, 30% of the population of Western Samoa died, despite the fact that the entire country had had zero contact with the outside world before the deaths occurred.