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A new study has found that the coronavirus may have spread outside of China much earlier than previously thought.
A study by the National Cancer Institute said the deadly virus appears to have circulated in Milan last September – five months before the detection of Italy’s first COVID-19 patient and three months before the outbreak was reported in Wuhan, in China.
Italian researchers now report that 12% of the 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 developed antibodies to the coronavirus long before February 21, when the country’s first case was identified .
Giovanni Apolone, co-author of the study, said four cases date back to early October 2019, meaning healthy volunteers would have been infected in September.
“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.
In March, Italian researchers reported an above-average number of severe pneumonia and influenza cases outside Milan in the last quarter of 2019 – an early sign that the virus may have spread long before the outbreak.
With pole wires
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