The run_date output from Fetch_SRA_to_BAM appears to be retrieving the wrong SRA metadata field for the run date. Take for example SRR1972917 (and similar). The run_date returned is 2020-04-29, which must have something to do with the most recent time that SRA regenerated/reprocessed the data somehow (this appears to correspond to the SRALite reprocessing). I think the field we really want might be in EXPERIMENT_PACKAGE_SET. EXPERIMENT_PACKAGE .RUN_SET.RUN.published or something like that.... should be investigated/confirmed/fixed.