That the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19 has escaped from a Chinese laboratory “no one can tell”. But “that Sars-CoV-2 has existed for longer than when the pandemic was declared, and compared to the Wuhan pneumonia earlier, it is absolutely ascertained through phylogeny studies and also by studies in which we participated. , finding the virus in wastewater as early as November 2019 “. Maria Rita Gismondo, director of the Laboratory of clinical microbiology, virology and bio-emergency diagnostics at the Sacco hospital in Milan, reminds Adnkronos Salute.
Speaking last July at a conference in the Senate, the expert stressed that “we are talking about a virus whose origin has not yet been clarified. At the end of December” 2019 “arrived at my department” al Sacco, “one of the two national reference centers for bioemergencies, the bulletin of the Ministry of Health on 41 pneumonia of strange aetiology in Wuhan. We all then said that this virus came from the wet markets of Wuhan, too bad that we later discovered that cases of pneumonia from a unknown virus there had also been “before” in 2019 and recently – reported Gismondo at the time – my staff, with the Higher Institute of Health and with the CNR, published a work showing that the virus exists in the wastewater of Milan it was already at the end of November. So let’s forget that origin “.
In short, when Covid-19 began to worry the world, “the virus had already been circulating for some time – the microbiologist repeats today – in a probably more attenuated form, after which mutations have made it more aggressive. I believe that in China there is there have been many more cases, as the Chinese authorities have also stated, than have been reported, and certainly much earlier than when they were revealed to the WHO and to the whole world “.