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CDC journal: COVID-19 circulating in Italy in late November
2020-12-10 
FILE PHOTO: A general view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, September 30, 2014. [Photo/Agencies]

Italy identified the novel coronavirus in a patient in early December, researchers said in a new study published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the latest research suggesting that the disease hit Europe earlier than thought.

"We identified severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) RNA in an oropharyngeal swab specimen collected from a child with suspected measles in early December 2019," Antonella Amendola of the University of Milan and other authors wrote  in the CDC's Emerging Infectious Disease journal.

SARS-CoV-2 is the respiratory virus that causes COVID-19, while RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a nucleic acid present in all living cells.

That was about three months before the first identified coronavirus disease case in Italy, they said in an early release of their article in the February 2021 issue of the journal.

"This finding expands our knowledge on timing and mapping of novel coronavirus transmission pathways," the Italian authors wrote.

COVID-19 symptoms can appear as early as two days after infection or as late as 14 days, according to the CDC.

This could mean the coronavirus was circulating in Italy as soon as the end of November 2019, as reported by the Bloomberg on Wednesday, which cited the same research.

The new study provides further perspective into demystify the origin of COVID-19, as other scientific papers also suggested the novel coronavirus appeared in the United States in mid-December 2019 and in France in late December, before or around the time the virus was officially identified in China.

China reported cases of what people then called "pneumonia of unknown cause" on Dec 27. The World Health Organization said it received China's official report on the cluster of cases on Jan 3.

In the Italian case, researchers said the boy, who lived in the surrounding area of Milan and had no reported travel history, had cough and rhinitis on Nov 30 and was taken to the emergency department with respiratory symptoms and vomiting a week later.

"These findings, in agreement with other evidence of early COVID-19 spread in Europe, advance the beginning of the outbreak to late autumn 2019," the authors noted.

In France, for example, researchers found the virus in a retrospective analysis of a specimen from a patient who was hospitalized in France on Dec 27, 2019, which was weeks before the first cases were confirmed in France on Jan 24, 2020.

The Italian researchers pointed out, however, earlier strains also might have been occasionally imported to Italy and other countries in Europe during the late autumn period, but those importations could have been different from the strain that became widespread in Italy during the first months of 2020.

Italy was the first Western country severely hit by the COVID-19 epidemic, with the first known COVID-19 case reported in the town of Codogno in the Lombardy region on Feb 21.

However, some evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 had been circulating unnoticed for several weeks in Lombardy before the first official detection, according to the CDC journal article.

Italy logged 499 coronavirus-related deaths on Wednesday, adding the total to more than

61,7 00 since February, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain.

Researchers in the country have never stopped their quest for the exact timeline of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy.

Environmental surveillance has "unequivocally" demonstrated the presence of the virus, at concentrations comparable to those obtained from samples collected at later stages of the pandemic, in the untreated wastewater of the Milan area as early as mid-December 2019, according to the article.

Another research article, published by the National Cancer Institute's scientific magazine Tumori Journalon Nov 11, show that 11.6 percent of 959 healthy volunteers participating in a lung cancer screening trial in Italy between September 2019 and March 2020 had developed coronavirus antibodies.

Scientists with the US CDC also found evidence of the novel coronavirus infection in 106 of 7,389 blood donations collected from residents in nine states across the US as early as mid-December, according to their study published online in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseaseslast Monday.

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