Tumori J: The new coronavirus is not the first to appear in China! New research suggests the virus spread in Italy as early as last September

NOVEMBER 16, 2020 /--- In a new study, researchers from several research institutions, including the National Cancer Institute of Italy, the University of Siena and the University of Milan, found that the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) has been circulating in Italy since September 2019, three months earlier than first reported in China.
results were published online November 11, 2020 in the journal Tumori Journal under the title "Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy".
in December 2019, the first unexplained cases of pneumonia were reported in Wuhan, central China.
the disease, which was later identified by the World Health Organization as SARS-CoV-2, is now raging around the world.
, however, the new study increases the possibility that the coronavirus originated outside China and spread earlier than is widely believed.
first COVID-19 patient recorded by Italian authorities was found on February 21 this year in a small town near Milan, north of Lombardo.
, however, in the new study, the researchers found that 11.6 percent of the 959 healthy volunteers who participated in lung cancer screening trials between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed new coronavirus antibodies by February.
the results were obtained by conducting specific SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests on blood samples from the volunteers.
for a total of 24 weeks from September 2019 to February 2020, IgM (red) and IgG (blue) positive cases against the SARS-CoV-2 hedgehog protein binding domain (RBD) accounted for the total number of screening participants (green), pictured from Tumori Journal, 2020, doi:10.1177/0300891620974755.
These results suggest that SARS-CoV-2 circulated in Italy earlier than the first official confirmed case of COVID-19 in lombarda and even earlier than the first official reports issued by the Chinese authorities, providing new clues to the occurrence and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Giovanni Apolone of Italy's National Cancer Institute, co-lead author of the
paper, told Reuters the study showed that four cases dating back to the first week of October were also SARS-CoV-2-positive, meaning they had been infected since September last year.
Apolone said, "The main finding of this study is that people with no symptoms not only test positive for serology, but also produce antibodies that kill the virus."
," he added, "this means that the new coronavirus can circulate in the population for a long time, and the fatality rate is low, not because it is disappearing, but because it is proliferating again."
" Italian researchers told Reuters back in March that they had reported a higher-than-usual number of cases of severe pneumonia and influenza in lombardo in the last quarter of 2019, suggesting that the new coronavirus may have spread earlier than previously thought.
(Bioon.com) Reference: 1.Giovanni Apollo et al. Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy. Tumori Journal, 2020, doi:10.1177/0300891620974755.2.Study: Coronavirus emerged in Italy as early as Sept. 2019。