A "strange pneumonia" was reportedly detected by several doctors as early as November in Italy. Well before the "official" spread of Covid-19 in the country, and even in China.
Did Covid-19 already circulate in November in Italy? In an interview with the American media NPR, Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Institute of Pharmacological Research in Milan, recently explained that he had echoes from doctors reporting "very strange, very serious cases of pneumonia , and mainly affecting elderly patients ", in December and "even last November in the north of the Italian peninsula.
These words are important insofar as they imply that a virus was circulating, at least in Lombardy, before we knew about the appearance of Covid-19 in Italy. This interview obviously did not escape Chinese state media, which quickly reported that the disease could have emerged on the peninsula before to crack down on China .
Asked on topic by the DailyMail , The Italian Professor nevertheless wanted to clarify things. On the one hand, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that the virus that was raging in November in northern Italy, which caused these "strange pneumonias", was indeed the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. .
On the other hand the doctor said that, based on genetic studies, he is now "certain that the new coronavirus first appeared in China, before spreading to the rest of the world.
If there is no evidence, once again, that the cases of pneumonia recorded in November in northern Italy are to the credit of Covid-19, we should even consider the fact that the emergence of the disease ultimately happened in China long before health authorities realized it . "Probably because of the large number of asymptomatic carriers “, explains the doctor.
In fact, about ten days ago we learned that "patient zero" would have been treated on November 17 in a hospital in Wuhan, which is earlier than this. which was announced so far. By the end of 2019, 266 patients were already officially listed in China.
As a reminder, there are already more than 537,000 confirmed cases worldwide (and more than 24,000 deaths). But if we assume that the virus was actually circulating long before health authorities were able to isolate it, then the toll today could be much higher than it appears.
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