Coronavirus present in Italy before Wuhan
New study from Milan finds evidence of COVID-19 cases earlier than thought
The novel coronavirus may have been circulating in Italy since September 2019, three months before it first emerged in China, according to a study released by the National Cancer Institute (INT) in Milan.
If true, it would mean that the virus was present in Italy three months before it was first reported in China in December, and five months before the first official case was recorded in Italy on Feb 21.
The World Health Organization said on Nov 16 that it was reviewing the results from Italy and additional information published there and was seeking clarification.
The research, published by the INT’s scientific magazine Tumori Journal, showed that 11.6 percent of the 959 healthy volunteers who participated in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed COVID-19 antibodies well before February.
A further SARS-CoV-2 antibodies test was carried out by the University of Siena for the same study titled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy”.
Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, said in the Nov 15 release that four cases from the study dated to the first week of October last year, which means those people had been infected in September.
“This is the main finding: People with no symptoms not only were positive after the serological tests but also had antibodies able to kill the virus,” Apolone told the media.
“It means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for a long time and with a low rate of lethality, not because it is disappearing, only to surge again,” he said.
The northern region of Lombardy, whose capital is Milan where the pandemic first emerged in late February, had previously reported an unusually high number of cases of severe flu and pneumonia in the last quarter of 2019 in a sign that COVID-19 may have circulated earlier than previously thought.
Before the release, Italy’s first COVID-19 patient had been confirmed on Feb 21 in a small town near Milan.
The flu- like outbreak in Italy reminded of flu and pneumonia-like outbreaks in the US last year. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a congressional hearing on March 11 that some deaths from coronavirus have been discovered posthumously.
During the US House Oversight Committee discussion on the novel coronavirus response, Congressman Harley Rouda asked Redfield if it was possible that some flu patients may have been misdiagnosed and actually had coronavirus. He asked: “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”
Redfield replied: “Some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States to date.”
Although he stopped short of revealing the timeline and localities of such deaths, in retrospect, an outbreak of respiratory illness at the Greenspring Retirement Community in Springfield, Virginia — with 63 cases of infections out of a total of 263 residents — reported by the US media in July 2019, seems to fit the description, although it was not reported to the WHO.
The WHO said it would contact the Milan paper’s authors “to discuss and arrange for further analyses of available samples and verification of the neutralization results”.
Although the WHO had said the SARS- CoV-2 and COVID-19, the respiratory disease it causes, were unknown before the outbreak was reported in Wuhan, Central China, in December, it has also said “the possibility that the virus may have silently circulated elsewhere cannot be ruled out”.
In Wuhan, professionals have wondered whether the city’s outbreak was started by frozen food imports late last year.
The Chinese mainland has detected at least 16 cases involving frozen imports testing positive for the presence of the novel coronavirus since July, prompting customs officials to ramp up supervision over foreign goods and suspend imports from a number of manufacturers.
In October, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said it isolated living novel coronavirus on the outer packaging of frozen food when investigating the source of an outbreak in Qingdao, Shandong province. The discovery, a world first, proved that contact with frozen food packaging contaminated by live virus could cause infection. Qingdao suffered a small-scale outbreak last summer that was soon put under control.
Later that month, a Chinese research team consisting of university researchers and CDC experts concluded from epidemiologic history and data analysis that the outbreak that took place in Beijing in June was likely to have been triggered by imported seafood, and cold-chain transportation could be a new route of transmission for the virus.
This month, the provincial capital of Zhengzhou in Central China found SARS-CoV-2 in packaging of imported frozen pork, and Jinan in East China as well as Tianjin in North China found coronavirus in packaging of frozen seafood.