MILAN—Italian researchers are looking at whether a higher than usual number of cases of severe pneumonia and flu in Lombardy in the last quarter of 2019 may be a signal that the CCP virus, also known as the new coronavirus, might have spread beyond China earlier than previously thought.
Adriano Decarli, an epidemiologist and medical statistics professor at the University of Milan, said there had been a “significant” increase in the number of people hospitalized for pneumonia and flu in the areas of Milan and Lodi between October and December last year.
He told Reuters he could not give exact figures but “hundreds” more people than usual had been taken to hospital in the last three months of 2019 in those areas—two of Lombardy’s worst hit cities—with pneumonia and flu-like symptoms, and some of those had died.
Decarli is reviewing the hospital records and other clinical details of those cases, including people who later died at home, to try to understand whether the CCP virus epidemic had already spread to Italy back then.
“We want to know if the virus was already here in Italy at the end of 2019, and, if yes, why it remained undetected for a relatively long period so that we could have a clearer picture in case we have to face a second wave of the epidemic,” he said.
The new coronavirus and COVID-19, the respiratory disease it causes, was first reported by the Chinese communist regime in Wuhan, central China, in late December.
Decarli said once his research was concluded, local health authorities might decide to request authorisation to exhume bodies of people with suspect symptoms.
Other experts cast doubt on the hypothesis that the new virus could have been circulating in Europe before the end of 2019.
“I think it extremely unlikely that the virus was present in Europe before January,” said Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia who has been tracking the evolving pandemic.
Hunter said that unless Italian scientists get positive results from samples taken and stored at that time, then the suggestion should not be given credence.
High Death Toll
Italy, which now has the highest official death toll from COVID-19 in the world—perhaps due to the CCP’s lack of transparency—recorded its first known case of the CCP virus on Feb. 21, though some scientists think the virus began circulating in the country at least a month earlier.“The virus was already here in the second half of January,” said Massimo Galli, head of the infectious disease unit at Milan’s Sacco hospital and a professor at the department of biomedical and clinical sciences at the University of Milan.
He said, however, that the probability of the virus circulating in Italy before January was “very low.”
Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research, in Milan, said some family doctors in Lombardy had reported unusual cases of pneumonia late last year that now looked potentially suspicious.
He said among those were several cases of bilateral pneumonia—which means both lungs are affected—in the areas of Gera D'Adda and Crema in late November and December, with high fever, cough, fatigue, and difficulty breathing.
“None of these cases have been documented as COVID-19 because there was no evidence yet of the existence of COVID-19,” he said.
Remuzzi said that if evidence of COVID-19 cases in Italy as far back as November was confirmed, this may signal that the virus can go undetected for months.
He said some reports in scientific journals had also led other scientists to question whether the virus may have emerged in China as early as October.
