Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, said that four cases from the study dated to the first week in October last year, which means those people had been infected in September….reports Asian Lite News
Researchers from the University of Milan have recently found that a woman in the northern Italian city was infected with Covid-19 in November 2019, according to media reports.
Through two different techniques on skin tissue, the researchers identified in a biopsy of a 25-year-old woman the presence of RNA gene sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus dating back to November 2019, according to Italian regional daily newspaper L’Unione Sarda.
“There are, in this pandemic, cases in which the only sign of COVID-19 infection is that of a skin pathology,” Raffaele Gianotti, who coordinated the research, was quoted by the newspaper as saying, Xinhua news agency reported.
“I wondered if we could find evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in the skin of patients with only skin diseases before the officially recognized epidemic phase began,” said Gianotti, adding “we found ‘the fingerprints’ of COVID-19 in the skin tissue.”
Based on data in the world literature, this is “the oldest evidence of the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a human being,” said the report.
According to a study released last month, The novel coronavirus might have been circulating in Italy since September 2019, three months before it first emerged in China.
If true, it would mean that the virus was present in Italy three months before it was first reported in China’s Wuhan in December 2019, and five months before the first official case was recorded in Italy on February 21, 2020, reports Xinhua news agency.
The study by the Milan-based National Cancer Institute (INT) which was released on Sunday showed that 11.6 per cent of the 959 healthy volunteers who participated in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 to March 2020 had developed Covid-19 antibodies well before February.
Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, said that four cases from the study dated to the first week in October last year, which means those people had been infected in September.
Also read:Italy approves plan for mass vaccination