#ITALY LOCKDOWN NOVEMBER TRIAL#

And because this is 'such an unexpected finding,' it should be confirmed with other antibody tests such as those that look for antibodies against another one of the coronavirus' proteins, an outer coat called a 'nucleocapsid,' which is also unique to the novel coronavirus, he said. His previous experience has shown that such antibody tests for the coronavirus' RBD can create a lot of false positives, Rutherford told Live Science.

The results 'have to be confirmed with different antibody tests,' that look for the prevalence of antibodies that target other parts of the coronavirus. George Rutherford, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, who was also not a part of the study.

'I would be very cautious,' about these findings, said Dr. For instance, in Spain, far less than 10% of the population tested positive for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in the summer, despite the fact that 28,000 people had died from COVID-19 up to that point, according to a survey published in August in the journal The Lancet. She added that it would be nice to see more studies reanalyze blood or other biological samples collected in late summer and fall of 2019 to see if they arrive at similar results.īut it's hard to imagine that a substantial fraction of the population was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in September in Italy without a dramatic uptick in pneumonia-like cases then. If the virus was circulating earlier than previously thought, 'it may mean that it is (or was) less deadly than current estimates because of how long it took to be identified.' In other words, if these samples do indeed show evidence of early COVID-19 infections, they may not have been detected by the medical system possibly because they were somehow less deadly at the time. This is 'credible evidence that the virus was circulating prior to WHO's awareness of it' and may help explain how the disease spread so quickly in Italy, said Krys Johnson, an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who was not a part of the study. 'Our results indicate that SARS-CoV-2 circulated in Italy earlier than the first official COVID-19 cases were diagnosed in Lombardy, even long before the first official reports from the Chinese authorities, casting new light on the onset and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic,' the authors wrote in the study. They also found that 53.2% of these cases were participants from Lombardy. Specifically, the researchers found coronavirus antibodies in 23 patients who gave samples in September and in 27 who gave samples in October. They found that 111 of these 959 people, all asymptomatic at the time their blood was drawn, had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in their blood at the time it was taken, meaning that about 11.6% of the entire group had been infected with the virus before March. They looked for antibodies specific to the receptor binding domain (RBD) - the dock on the coronavirus' spike protein that it uses to latch onto and invade human cells.

#ITALY LOCKDOWN NOVEMBER TRIAL#

To further clarify the early movements of the virus, a group of researchers analyzed blood samples from people in Italy who were enrolled in a prospective lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020.

Italy lockdown november