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ROME, Nov.15 (Xinhua) – The coronavirus may have been circulating in Italy since September 2019, three months before it first emerged in China, according to a study released Sunday by the National Cancer Institute (INT) in Milan. .
If true, it would mean that the virus was present in Italy three months before it was first reported in China in December 2019, and five months before the first official case was recorded in Italy on February 21, 2019.
INT’s research showed that 11.6 percent of the 959 healthy volunteers who participated in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed COVID-19 antibodies long before February.
Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, said that four cases in the study dated from the first week of October last year, meaning those people had been infected in September.
The northern region of Lombardy, the capital of which is Milan, where the pandemic first emerged in late February, had previously reported an unusually high number of severe flu and pneumonia cases in the final quarter of 2019, a sign that COVID -19 may have circulated earlier than previously thought. Final product
