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PHOTO: Pixabay
The new coronavirus has been circulating in Italy since September 2019, according to a study by the National Cancer Institute, based in the Italian city of Milan. This means that COVID-19 may have spread outside of China earlier than previously thought, Reuters reported.
The World Health Organization said the new coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease it causes were unknown before the first outbreak was reported in Wuhan, central China, in December. The first case of infection in Italy was officially registered on February 21 in a small town near Milan, BTA reports.
But the findings of a study by Italian researchers published in the Tumor Journal of the National Cancer Institute show that 11.6 percent of 959 healthy volunteers participated in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020. ., developed antibodies to the coronavirus long before February 2020.
The University of Siena conducted an additional specific test for antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus for the same study entitled “Unexpected detection of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in the pre-pandemic period in Italy.”
The test showed that four of the antibody cases date from the first week of October, meaning these people were infected in September, said Giovanni Apollone, a co-author of the study.
“This is the main conclusion: people without symptoms not only had positive results after serological tests, but also had antibodies capable of destroying the virus,” he said.
“This means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for a long time and with a low mortality rate, not because it disappears, but only to re-emerge,” he added.
Italian researchers told Reuters in March they had a higher than usual number of severe pneumonia and flu cases in Lombardy in the last quarter of last year, suggesting that the new coronavirus may have circulated earlier. than previously thought.
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