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A new scientific report suggests that the SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19, was able to circulate in Italy without having been identified as early as September 2019. A discovery that questions the consideration that the coronavirus began to spread outside China after November 2019.
Surely, we don’t know everything about Covid-19. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the virus appeared in Wuhan, China on November 17 before spreading around the world. In Italy in particular, a study published last March revealed that SARS-CoV-2 may have silently started circulating in January. In any case, a dark period followed that we all already know. In fact, this European country is one of the most affected by the first wave of the epidemic.
Photo by Fernando Zhiminaicela – Pixabay.com
However, if a new study is to be believed, it could be that Covid-19 appeared there much earlier than you think.
Antibodies discovered earlier
This study is due to the National Cancer Institute (INT) in Milan. According to Reuters, it was taken seriously by the WHO.
Note that the latter has already stated that “the possibility that the virus may have silently circulated elsewhere cannot be ruled out”.
INT states in its report that people among healthy volunteers who were screened during a lung cancer screening campaign between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed antibodies specific to Covid-19 well before February 2020.
Specifically, of the 959 individuals diagnosed, 11.6% had shown the presence of antibodies.
Italy outbreak of Covid-19 from the middle of the third quarter of 2019?
During the “prepandemic period in Italy”, in the first week of October 2019, the University of Siena had carried out tests on antibodies capable of stopping the development of the new coronavirus. These tests allowed them to detect four cases. For Giovanni Apolone, co-author of the study, this means that the subjects had been infected in September 2019!
“People without symptoms were not only diagnosed positive by serological tests, they also had antibodies capable of killing the virus.”, explained, Reuters reports. For this expert, their findings show that SARS-CoV-2 “can circulate among the population for quite a long time and with a low mortality rate.”
In addition to this study, note that Italian scientists in March reported an unusually high number of severe pneumonia and influenza cases in Lombardy in the fourth quarter of 2019. Coincidence or not, this suggests that Covid-19 may have started to hit the world. ‘Italy in the third quarter of last year.
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