ROME (Reuters) – A new coronavirus broke out in Italy in September 2019, according to a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) in the Italian city of Milan, indicating that it may have spread beyond China before thought.
The World Health Organization says new coronaviruses and COVID-19 were unaware of respiratory disease before an outbreak in Wuhan, central China, last year. But he said that “the possibility of the virus spreading peacefully elsewhere cannot be ruled out.”
The WHO said on Monday it was reviewing Italy’s results and was seeking clarification of additional information published there over the weekend.
On February 21, Italy’s first Covid-19 patient was discovered in a small town near Milan, in the northern region of Lombardy.
Findings from Italian researchers published by INT’s scientific journal Tumori Journal show that between September 2019 and March 2020, 11.6% of the 959 healthy volunteers registered for lung cancer screening tested positive for coronavirus antibodies before February.
Further SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing was conducted by the University of Siena for similar research entitled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in pre-epidemic period in Italy”.
It showed that four cases up to the first week of October were positive for antibodies, meaning they became infected in September, the study’s co-author Giovanni Apollo told Reuters.
“These are the main findings: people with no symptoms were not only positive after serological tests, but antibodies were also able to kill the virus,” Apollo said.
“This means that the new coronavirus can spread in the population over a long period of time and with a low fatal rate, because it is disappearing, just to increase again,” he said.
The WHO said it would contact the authors of the paper and “discuss and adjust for further analysis of available samples and verification of neutral results.”
Italian researchers told Reuters in March that they had found the number of cases of severe pneumonia and flu in Lombardy in the last quarter of 2019 to be higher than normal as new coronaviruses may have flowed before consideration.
Reporting by Giselda Wagno; Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebhai in Geneva; Edited by Amelia Sithole-Matariz and Janet Lawrence
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