On the 9th local time, the National Tumor Research Institute of Milan, Italy, issued a press release stating that they provided the WHO with blood samples containing antibodies to the new crown virus collected in 2019. The results may confirm their inference that the new crown virus was in 2019. It has spread in Italy.
The communiqué stated that the blood samples submitted for inspection were collected between October and December 2019. The WHO designated a laboratory in the Netherlands to conduct retesting. The test results and related interpretations still cannot determine the origin and nature of the new crown virus, but it can prove whether the virus has spread in Italy before the official announcement of the first confirmed case of local new crown pneumonia on February 21, 2020.
Research says that the new coronavirus may have been concerned about spreading in September 2019
In November 2020, researchers from the National Tumor Research Institute of Milan, Italy and other institutions published a paper in the country’s “Journal of Oncology” saying that they tested the health of 959 volunteers who participated in the tumor screening test from September 2019 to March 2020. Blood samples, it was found that 111 of the volunteers had specific antibodies to the new coronavirus in their blood samples, accounting for 11.6% of the total number of volunteers.
The first author of the paper, Giovanni Apolone, said that the presence of this antibody in the blood samples of four volunteers collected in the first week of October 2019 indicates that they are likely to have been infected with the new coronavirus in September 2019. This may also explain why the epidemic broke out suddenly in northern Italy in February 2020.
More research findings rewrite the timeline of the new crown epidemic
The most scientific way to trace the source of the new coronavirus is to find clues related to the origin of the virus as much as possible, and to expand the virus tracking research in order to obtain accurate information. Many countries have made some new discoveries about the early new crown virus, which has triggered new thinking in the academic community on the origin and spread of the new crown virus.
In January of this year, researchers from the University of Milan, Italy, reported in the British Journal of Dermatology that they found the new coronavirus gene sequence from a biopsy sample of a young female patient with skin disease in Italy on November 10, 2019.
In December last year, another group of researchers from the University of Milan reported in the US “Journal of New Infectious Diseases” that a 4-year-old boy’s oropharyngeal swab sample collected on December 5, 2019 tested positive for the new crown virus. The boy had no travel history before that time.
In November last year, researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in the bimonthly issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases that they tested 7,389 blood samples collected by the American Red Cross between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020. It was found that 106 blood samples contained antibodies to the new coronavirus.
Not only have clues to earlier new coronavirus infections found in humans, research on wastewater also shows that the new coronavirus may already exist.
The University of Barcelona in Spain issued a communiqué in June last year that a research team at the school found that a wastewater sample collected on March 12, 2019 tested positive for the new coronavirus nucleic acid, but the virus level was very low. This means that the new crown virus may have existed in Barcelona at that time, which is much earlier than the time when the first confirmed case of new crown was reported in the world.
The Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil published a research report in July last year that the research team detected the genetic material of the new coronavirus in a wastewater sample collected in Florianópolis on November 27, 2019. This is about three months ahead of the time when Brazil reported the first new crown case.
The Italian Institute of Advanced Health issued a communiqué in June last year, stating that researchers had detected the genetic material of the new crown virus in the wastewater from the cities of Milan and Turin that were sampled on December 18, 2019.