Coronavirus was already circulating in Italy in October 2019, according to study

A study prepared by a scientist at the National Cancer Institute in Milan claims to have found antibodies to the coronavirus in patients who were studied in October 2019, two months before China informed the WHO of what was so far calls the first epidemic. of this disease, in the city of Wuham.

According to El Mundo, the study could not only show that the coronavirus would have been registered in China long before the local regime communicated it to the WHO authorities on the last day of 2019, but that even the spread to others regions could have started months ago.

So far, official data indicated that the first Italian Covid-19 patient was identified on February 21 in a small town near Milan in the northern Lombardy region.

However, research by the National Cancer Institute in Milan, published by Tumori Journal, shows that 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed antibodies. against the coronavirus well before February.

The antibody test carried out by a laboratory at the University of Siena and the results showed that at least four patients were positive during the first week of October.

“This is the main finding: People without symptoms not only tested positive after serological tests, but also had antibodies capable of killing the virus,” Giovanni Apolone, co-author of the study, told Reuters .

“This means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for a long time and with a low death rate not because it is disappearing but only to re-emerge,” he added.