Traces of the new coronavirus are present in the wastewater of Milan and Turin, in northern Italy, as of December 2019, two months before the first officially registered patient in the country, indicates a study by the Higher Institute of the health (ISS) Italian.
“The study examined 40 wastewater samples collected between October 2019 and February 2020. The results, confirmed by two different laboratories with two different methods”, confirmed the presence of RNA (ribonucleic acid, essential element of a virus ) of SARS-Cov-2 in the samples taken in Milan and Turin on 12/18/2019 ″, explains a press release from the ISS, the public reference institute.
Identical traces were also found in the wastewater of Bologna (north-central) on January 29, 2020, while the first official case of coronavirus contracted in Italy was reported on February 20, in the small town of Codogno, not far from Milan.
The ISS also specifies that the samples from October and November 2019 revealed no trace of the coronavirus in the wastewater.
“This research can help to understand the beginning of the circulation of the virus in Italy and provides consistent information compared to” analyzes carried out in France on samples of hospitalized patients who identified a positive for SARS-CoV-2 (…) dating back to December 2019 ″, said the ISS press release.
These findings are in line with estimates by Chinese scientists who expect the virus to appear in mid-December in a Wuhan game market, although Beijing recently hinted that the virus could have arrived in China from foreign.
The institute also cites a Spanish study that identified RNA of this virus in Barcelona's wastewater collected around mid-January "around 40 days before the notification of the first indigenous case" in Spain.
“Our results confirm the evidence now acquired at international level on the importance of virus surveillance in samples taken from wastewater and at the entrance to water treatment plants”, ensures in this same study Luca Lucentini , an ISS official.
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