Who Was Italy's COVID-19 Patient-Zero

Raffaele Gianotti, a dermatopathologist with the University of Milan, said 'SARS-CoV-2 had been found in the 25-year-old woman’s preserved skin tissue from November 2019. She was misdiagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder but could now be Italy’s COVID-19 “patient zero”, reported the SCMP on January 13, 2021.

These researchers analyzed skin biopsies of patients from Milan, Italy, in July 2020, with dermatoses and positive PCR swabs for SARS‐CoV‐2 at different infection stages. The test results were compared to skin biopsies of non‐diagnosed COVID-19 patients with dermatoses who were at high‐risk of COVID‐19 infection.

“Our patient could represent the oldest case in the literature of detection of the coronavirus on tissue samples,” Gianotti and his collaborators in a peer-reviewed paper published in the British Journal of Dermatology on January 7, 2021.

A newer paper reported in November 2020 the presence of SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain-specific antibodies in blood samples of asymptomatic Italian individuals enrolled in a prospective lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020.