translated from Spanish: The Covid-19 would have circulated in Italy in September 2019

A study developed by milan’s National Cancer Institute, conducted on volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial, revealed that covid-19 was circulating there well before the first case, Tumori Journal published.
Test results conducted between September 2019 and March 2020 showed that 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers had developed antibodies against the new coronavirus well before February. China first reported on the outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019 and the first contagion in Italy was on 21 February 2020.
In fact, another virus-specific antibody test, developed by the University of Siena for the same research, found four positive cases for antibodies neutralizing the virus in the first week of October. For this, as explained by the studio’s co-author, Giovanni Apolone, this would imply that people were infected in September.
The researcher added that “people without symptoms not only tested positive after serological tests, but also had antibodies capable of killing the virus (…) It means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for a long time and with a low fatality rate not because it is disappearing but only to re-emerge.”

Original source in Spanish