Roma: Apart from China, Italy is one of the places that is a hot topic of the presence of the corona virus. The reason is, this European country has had cases of the fast growing virus since February 2020.
In fact, some suspected that the covid-19 case had already existed before that month. Quoted from Reuters, the National Cancer Institute (INT) stated that the corona virus had landed in Italy since September 2019.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says that covid-19, a respiratory disease. It was not known before the outbreak was first reported in Wuhan, in central China, last December. Italy’s first COVID-19 patient was detected on February 21 in a small town near Milan, in the northern region of Lombardy.
Viral antibodies
But the findings of Italian researchers, published by the scientific magazine INT Tumori Journal, show that 11.6% of the 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial, between September 2019 and March 2020, had developed coronavirus antibodies long before February.
The specific SARS-CoV-2 antibody test was further carried out by the University of Siena. This study is entitled: The unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy.
Giovanni Apolone, co-author of the study said that four cases in the first week of October were also found to be positive for virus-neutralizing antibodies. This means they have been infected since September.
“This is the main finding. “People without symptoms not only become positive after serological tests but also have antibodies that can kill the virus,” says Apolone.
“This means that the new corona virus can circulate in the community for a long time and with a low mortality rate, not because it disappears, but only jumps again,” he added.
Italian researchers told Reuters in March that they reported a higher than usual number of cases of pneumonia and flu in Lombardy. Precisely in the last quarter of 2019, as a sign that the new coronavirus may have been circulating earlier than previously thought.
(FIR)
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