Researchers say COVID-19 study in Italy does not dispute the origins of the virus

MILAN – Authors of a study showing the new coronavirus was circulating in Italy earlier than experts previously believed said on Thursday their data did not dispute the origins of COVID-19 as they defended the accuracy of their findings .

Results from Italian researchers showed that 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed anti-coronavirus antibodies well before February.

If these results are correct, scientists said it could change the story of the origin of the pandemic, raising questions about when and where the virus first appeared.

The new coronavirus was first identified in the city of Wuhan, in 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.

The Chinese government said on Tuesday that it believed the study showed the search for the origin of the virus was an ongoing process that may involve many countries.

But Italian researchers said that wasn’t necessarily their conclusion.

“These findings simply document that the epidemic in China was not detected on time,” Giovanni Apolone, scientific director of the National Cancer Institute (INT) and co-author of the study, said during a press conference in Milan.

The study also raised doubts among some Western scientists who called for further testing.

Much of the skepticism centered around the so-called specificity of antibody tests, which, if not perfect, could reveal the presence of antibodies to other diseases.

Emanuele Montomoli, co-author of the study and professor of preventive medicine at the University of Siena, defended the accuracy of the research, saying the tests identified the antibodies by targeting a part of the spike protein called the domain binding to the receptor (RBD), which is specific to the novel coronavirus.

“Subsequently, the serum samples were also tested on four different types of coronavirus circulating at the time in Europe and the United States and there were no cross reactions,” the scientist told the press conference.

Some scientists have also wondered how there could be such a high percentage of samples containing COVID-19 antibodies when the virus was only detected in 2.5% of the Italian population by the National Institute of Statistics (Istat) last spring.

Another study author said the two data sets were not comparable.

“Our study does not suggest at all that 11% of Italians had COVID antibodies in September-October,” said Gabriella Sozzi, director of cancer genomics at INT.

“These were 959 healthy volunteers, heavy smokers or former smokers aged 55 to 65, mostly men, and not a representative sample of Italians,” she added.

JPV

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