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By Giselda Vagnoni
ROME (Reuters) – The new coronavirus has been circulating in Italy since September 2019, according to a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) in the Italian city of Milan, reporting that COVID-19 could have spread beyond the China earlier than previously thought.
The World Health Organization said the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, the respiratory illness it causes, were unknown before the outbreak was first reported in Wuhan, central China , in December.
Italy’s first COVID-19 patient was detected on February 21 in a small town near Milan, in the northern Lombardy region.
But the results of Italian researchers, published by the scientific magazine of the INT Tumori Journal, show that 11.6% of the 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020, had developed antibodies. anti-coronavirus well before February.
Another specific test for anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies was carried out by the University of Siena for the same research entitled “Unexpected detection of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy”.
It showed that four cases dating back to the first week of October were also positive for antibodies that neutralize the virus, meaning they were infected in September, study co-author Giovanni Apolone told Reuters. .
“This is the main finding: people without symptoms were not only positive after serological tests, but also had antibodies capable of killing the virus,” said Apolone.
“This means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for a long time and with a low case fatality rate not because it is disappearing but only to rise again,” he added.
Italian researchers told Reuters in March they reported a higher than usual number of severe pneumonia and influenza cases in Lombardy in the last quarter of 2019, a sign that the new coronavirus could have circulated earlier than expected .
(Reporting by Giselda Vagnoni; editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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