[ad_1]
On November 21, 2019 in Milan, a 4-year-old boy attending kindergarten falls ill with a cough and a cold. It is not the usual ailment of the season. On November 30, he arrives at the emergency room because he vomits and has difficulty breathing. The next day his skin fills with bubbles and on December 5 his throat is cleared: the measles that doctors suspect is detected in this way. But that is not the correct diagnosis. In any case, the child is cured, and the swab, as usual, is stored in the freezer at minus 80 degrees in the university laboratory, which acts as a sentinel in the Moronet network for the spread of measles. Today, almost a year later, a group of university researchers ask themselves: what if it was Covid?
The Milan Cancer Institute: “The coronavirus in Italy since September 2019”. But scientists are divided
39 samples are taken from the frost, dating from September 2019 to February 2020. Thirty-eight are negative, but the baby’s swab is not. In that cotton swab, more than a year ago, there was already the coronavirus, a strain of Wuhan. The test carried out in the university laboratory for which Elisabetta Tanzi and Antonella Amendola are responsible is the same molecular swab that is used today for the diagnosis of positives. No test is 100 percent certain, but that is the most accurate we have and it directly detects the RNA of the coronavirus, not (as is the case with blood tests) the antibodies that could also react in contact with similar viruses.
Coronavirus, the secrets of Wuhan and those 65 days that changed the world
Carlo Bonini, Filippo Santelli, Federico Rampini, Anais Ginori, Tonia Mastrobuoni, Antonello Guerrera, Cosimo Cito
“But we did not stop there – tell Tanzi and Amendola – and to be completely sure that it was Sars-Cov2 we also read all the bases of a portion of his Rna, which corresponds to one hundred percent that of Wuhan.” The research, also signed by the dean of Medicine of the University of Milan Gian Vincenzo Zuccotti, was published in the international journal Emerging infectious diseases and on the website of Centers for Disease Control (Cdc) Americans.
“Nor can it be a case of laboratory contamination,” reasons Mario Raviglione, also an author of the study, professor of global health at the University of Milan and Queen Mary University of London. “That lab was closed in March and has never tested Covid swab.” In France, similarly, a man’s swab collected on December 27 was stored and found to be positive months later. “The explosion that the coronavirus had in northern Italy at the end of February – according to Raviglione – is perfectly compatible with an infection that has been going on for weeks or months.”
China November 17, the first infection a year ago. But it remains a mystery about the origins of Covid-19.
by our correspondent Filippo Santelli
Phylogenetic analysis of the viruses sequenced so far suggests the appearance of Sars-Cov2 in October-November in China. This is achieved by ordering all the RNA sequences of the coronaviruses found over time along a family tree. Returning to the branches, it is also possible to reconstruct the roots and estimate the moment of the appearance of a new virus in humans.
“To have the first symptoms on November 21 – continues Raviglione – the child was probably infected 4 or 5 days before. Neither he nor his family had traveled. So the coronavirus was already present in northern Italy in mid-November, confused with the flu symptoms. ” The Higher Institute of Health, with a June analysis coordinated by Giuseppina La Rosa, had also found the Sars-Cov2 genome in old sewage samples taken in Milan and Turin on December 18, 2019, and in Bologna on January 29. 2020. “The idea came from that news,” Tanzi and Amendola explain. “The virus is very dilute in water. To be detected, it had to be present in quantity.” Raviglione concludes: “We hope that other laboratories – concludes Raviglione – now have the same idea of recovering the old swabs and analyzing them for the coronavirus. So we could reconstruct a more accurate map of the arrival of the infection in Europe”.
All maps and charts of the pandemic.
