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The virus does not appear suddenly. It doesn’t “pop” when emergency rooms are full. It’s here. Long time. For months. Unnoticed. This is evident in Italy. A Milan study published in the Tumori Journal found subjects who had antibodies in September 2019. They had already survived the virus, so they must have been infected the summer before.
Kommissar Zufall tracks down the silent and malicious intruder. Since October 2018, the “SMILE” research project has been collecting data from test subjects for the prevention of lung tumors. This also includes blood samples. When the pandemic forced scientists into lockdown in the spring of this year, they rechecked the blood samples.
One in ten of the subjects already had the virus.
“While our research was on hiatus, we looked again at the X-ray images of the lungs,” says study director Umberto Pastorino to Il Fatto Quotidiano, “in some of the images we saw mild lesions like those found in Covid patients.” . This led the scientist to go to the bottom and test the blood samples serologically again.
The result: Of the 959 volunteer study participants, people between the ages of 55 and 75, all heavy smokers, 23 had antibodies in September 2019, 27 in October, 26 in November, 11 in December and 21 in February. A total of 111 tested positive. So more than 10 percent had already had the virus at the time of the outbreak in late February. Six of the subjects had even suffered more severe symptoms, but thought they were the flu; four of them already in October 2019.
The virus has already spread through Italy
Those infected come from different regions, not only from the former hot spots of Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont and Emilia, but also from Lazio, Tuscany, Aosta Valley, Sicily and Apulia. Therefore, Covid-19 has already spread throughout Italy at the end of February.
Suspicion arose early in the country that the virus had established itself very early. Doctors in Lodigiano, where the pandemic broke out across Europe, reported terrible pneumonia earlier in the year.
The Military World Championships are seen as the super-spreading event from which the virus may have been transported around the world. 10,000 athletes competed in Wuhan in October 2019. Also Italian Matteo Tagliariol (37). When he returned home to Italy, the fencer fell ill and had a severe flu, he said. The wife and son are also infected. The former Olympic champion surely had a Crown (VIEW reported). However, according to the SMILE study, there were already infected people in Italy before the big sporting event in China. So where did the virus really come from?
