The discovery is disturbing.
New clues that have appeared in recent days seem to indicate that the Covid-19 circulated in Italy even before the start of 2020. In the country, the first official case was however only reported at the end of February near Milan, in Lombardy.
These elements are therefore directly opposed to the common knowledge accumulated so far.
And the mystery that hovers around the origins of the coronavirus crisis still thickens a little, to the dismay of the scientific community.
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Either a “very early” and “unexpected” circulation likely, according to the researchers involved, to “reshape the history of the pandemic”.
" To be careful "
“For now, I believe that no one is able to understand these data, warns, perplexed, the famous Italian epidemiologist Carlo La Vecchia.
In this area, anything is possible.
But we have to be careful.
A press conference is expected this week to see more clearly.
It is of course possible that the first cases of coronavirus have passed far from the radars of the time.
As a reminder, China did not begin to communicate on the mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan until January.
Everything that happened before could therefore have gone unnoticed.
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To try to date a posteriori the beginnings of the spread of the virus, scientists have since resorted to a key indicator: excess mortality.
"In Italy, we observe a surplus of deaths in the Bergamo region from February," recalls Carlo La Vecchia.
This is why the virus is believed to have started circulating in January at most.
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How to reconcile, therefore, the absence of visible excess mortality and the presumed presence of the virus from the end of 2019?
The idea of a mutation of the coronavirus, which has become more dangerous over the months, cannot be absolutely ruled out.
But viruses tend, on the contrary, to become, with mutations, more and more benign as they become more contagious.
And mutations involve a large number of contaminations.
Controversy
“We must take a lot of precautions with this type of sudden discovery, warns Mircea T. Sofonea, lecturer in epidemiology and evolution of infectious diseases at the University of Montpellier (Hérault).
In this case, it is a study of a limited number of cases, in a rather minor review and which is based on serological tests, which are known to sometimes present up to 2% false positives. .
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This is not the first time, however, that the theory of an early appearance of the virus across the Alps has been the subject of speculation.
As early as March, the words of the director of the Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan had given rise to controversy in the scientific community.
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Dr Giuseppe Remuzzi then claimed to report "the impressions" of several general practitioners in northern Italy.
"They remember seeing very strange, very serious cases of pneumonia, especially in elderly patients, in December and even in November," he said in an interview with NPR, the main state public radio network. -United.
These allegations, which were not based on any scientific evidence, had been qualified as "fake news" by many colleagues of the researcher.
They could, if the most recent discoveries come to be corroborated, to be seriously reconsidered.