philat98

An interesting talk about Covid in Italy from September 2019. Italian radiologists made a mistake diagnosing patients.

scrubbedexpat077

Thanks for the link. I seem to remember that a group of athletes from Bergamo were at the Military World Games in October 2019 in Wuhan. We know how it ended.

C.2s

Hmmm...except the evidence he refers to suggests that the presence of Covid-19 in Italy predates the Military World Games.

There is another study of skin samples taken from patients who were treated for various dermatological symptoms in 2019 which has also shown evidence of Covid-19 being present in Italy during that Autumn. The earliest case they found was November.
https://media2-col.corriereobjects.i...ember_2019.pdf

philat98

The curious thing about the lung cancer study is that they found Covid19 antibodies in almost 1 in 10 tests that were made all over Italy. The effect of the virus in the Autumn for some reason was not a strong as in the following spring.

scrubbedexpat077

But this is not really news. There was a report of Covid-19 antibodies found in Spain from way earlier than that. False positives?

nicktonight

Can't yet believe these reports, apart from the fact that give weight to the Chinese claim that the virus didn't originate in Wuhan. If this highly infectious virus was already present in September or October then there would have been millions of cases by February 2020. As Malcolm suggests - false positives until further confirmation

C.2s

How do you know how many cases there were in February 2020?

But yes, the issue of false positives is addressed in the study that I gave a link to above. They were clearly aware of this potential and say they took steps to avoid this. I'm not qualified enough to say whether those steps were sufficient.

nicktonight

Just to play at amateur scientists then! The R value for covid in Italy in March 2020, before any action was taken, was 3. i.e each infected person infected 3 other people (while they were infectious which is mainly 2 days before they have symptoms). We may therefore assume that 3 people are infected in 1 week. The virus spreads exponentially so if there was 1 infected person in Italy in September 2019 there would be 3 to the power of 16 people infected 16 weeks later, i.e. 43 million people

C.2s

I agree, we are playing at amateur scientists, and just having a discussion in a general forum, so we're not going to be conversing at the same level as scientific journals etc would be doing, but I don't think there's any harm in people doing that. It's generally useful to talk things through and try and make sense of things from a layman's perspective. As long as we remember that speculating isn't the same as 'knowing' something.

And that was sort of my point. Does anyone 'know' how many cases there were? Given there was very little testing in the time period we are talking about we can probably agree that nobody really has any reliable information about the number of infections at that time.

If we start by looking at the R number value you are using, my understanding is that the R number is always calculated after infection by utlising data such as number of positive tests/number of hospital admissions/number of deaths, and is therefore always an estimate. And that estimate always involves modelling. And modelling always involves some assumptions. And so the R number may not be a real reflection of the situation. Would you agree?

This is important because there are always stochastic influences in the transmission of disease that might mean that the model is invalid for the population as a whole, and that the numbers are much higher in some sectors of the population (for example outpatients visiting hospitals) than others.

nicktonight

I'm sure not even my favorite TV expert Prof. Galli knows how many people were actually infected in Feb 2020 - However after what used to be called case 0 on 22nd Feb I think you could say that all Italian doctors were on the lookout for covid during March so not that many deaths would have then gone unnoticed. You can extrapolate the mortality curve backwards to show that there could not have been that many people infected in Italy before February. If you start to think that covid was present in all Italian regions in September 2019 you have to ask why the WHO went to Wuhan to study the virus origins and also why a virus that is 90% from a Chinese bat virus was present throughout Italy whereas it never appeared outside Wuhan last spring.

scrubbedexpat142

Popping in from Hungary!

A female friend of our teacher had a particularly nasty dose of flu at the beginning of December 2019 - & was eventually diagnosed with an "unknown virus" Maybe it was covid, maybe not.

scrubbedexpat142

First case reported in Thailand on 13th January 2019 (source: WHO).

Serrano

Come on, get serious. That's simply not the case (excuse the pun). Care to provide a link????????

scrubbedexpat142

WHO

Relevant extract -

Serrano

Yes, yes. 13 January 2020 NOT 2019.

So your point was?