ROME, Nov 16 (NNN-AGENCIES) – COVID-19 may have been circulating in Italy since Sept, 2019, three months before it first emerged in China, according to a study released by the National Cancer Institute (INT).
If true, it would mean that the virus was present in Italy three months before it was first reported in China in Dec, 2019, and five months before the first official case was recorded in Italy on Feb 21, 2019.
The INT research showed that 11.6 percent of the 959 healthy volunteers, who participated in a lung cancer screening trial between Sept, 2019 and Mar, 2020, had developed COVID-19 antibodies, well before Feb.
Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, said, four cases from the study dated to the first week in Oct last year, which means those people had been infected in Sept.
The northern region of Lombardy, whose capital is Milan, where the pandemic first emerged in late Feb, had previously reported an unusually high number of cases of severe flu and pneumonia, in the last quarter of 2019, in a sign that COVID-19 may have circulated earlier than previously thought.
