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MILAN: The authors of a study showing that the new coronavirus was circulating in Italy earlier than experts had previously believed said on Thursday (November 19) that their data did not question the origins of COVID-19, as they defended accuracy. of their findings.
The Italian researchers’ findings showed that 11.6 percent of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed antibodies to the coronavirus long before February.
If those findings are correct, the scientists said it could change the history of the origin of the pandemic, raising questions about when and where the virus first appeared.
The new coronavirus was first identified in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December. The first Italian patient with COVID-19 was detected on February 21 in a small town near Milan, in the northern region of Lombardy.
The Chinese government said Tuesday that it believed the study showed that tracing the origin of the virus was an ongoing process that may involve many countries.
But the Italian researchers said that’s not necessarily their conclusion.
“These findings simply document that the epidemic in China was not detected in time,” Giovanni Apolone, scientific director of the National Cancer Institute (INT) and co-author of the study, told a news conference in Milan.
The study has also raised doubts among some Western scientists who asked for more tests.
Much of the skepticism centered on the so-called specificity of antibody tests, which, if not perfect, could reveal the presence of antibodies against other diseases.
Emanuele Montomoli, a co-author of the study and a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Siena, defended the research’s accuracy, saying the tests identified the antibodies targeting a part of the spike protein called the receptor-binding domain (RBD), which is specific to the new coronavirus.
“Subsequently, the serum samples were also analyzed on four different types of coronavirus that were circulating at that time in Europe and the United States and there were no cross reactions,” the scientist said at a press conference.
Some scientists also questioned how there could be such a high percentage of samples with COVID-19 antibodies when the National Institute of Statistics (Istat) had detected the virus in only 2.5% of the Italian population last spring.
Another study author said that the two data sets were not comparable.
“Our study does not suggest at all that 11 percent of Italians had COVID antibodies in September-October,” said Gabriella Sozzi, director of Cancer Genomics at INT.
“They were 959 healthy volunteers, heavy smokers or ex-smokers between the ages of 55 and 65, mostly men, not a representative sample of Italians,” he added.
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