Italy's Coronavirus Outbreak May Have Started in 2019

The U.S. CDC published a Research Letter on December 8, 2020, which stated 'we identified SARS-CoV-2 RNA in an oropharyngeal swab specimen collected from a child in Italy with suspected measles in early December 2019.'

This group of international researchers said: 'the amplicon was sequenced by using Sanger technology, resulting in a sequence of 409 bp. Sequence analysis performed by using BLAST showed 100% identity to the reference sequence Wuhan-HU-1 (GenBank accession no. NC_045512.2) as well as to sequences of other SARS-CoV-2 strains circulating worldwide at a later stage. Therefore, accurately determining the origin of the identified strain was not possible.'

Prof. Amendola and Dr. Bianchi at the Department of Biomedical Sciences for Health, University of Milan, Italy, led this study.