In a quest to find the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, a young woman Italian seems to be an ongoing mystery, as researchers say they can not find it.
Members of the team set up by the World Health Organization (WHO), which studies the origins of coronavirus, want to investigate the case of the 25-year-old from Milan, who visited a hospital in November 2019 with sore throat and skin rash: symptoms of a disease that could not be detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan until a month later, according to a Wall Street Journal article.
The 25-year-old left behind a small skin sample and two tests more than six months later found traces of the virus that causes Covid-19, according to a study published in January by the British Journal of Dermatology.
Additional research into the woman’s case, scientists note, could help determine how long the virus has been circulating in China and elsewhere before the outbreak of the Uhan market in December 2019. The Covid-19 positive skin sample, which is in a researcher’s office in Milan, is a sample of the scattered evidence for the first days of the pandemic.
“You can not ignore it,” said Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, a member of the WHO-led team on the Italian case, in an interview in April. According to her, the case provided enough evidence for a wider investigation into whether the virus had spread to Italy before November 2019.
No one knows who she is or where she is
The problem, the researchers say, is that no one knows who they are or where they are. The hospital in Milan and the university in the Italian city, which supervised the case, said they did not have the woman’s details.
Raffaele Gianotti, the dermatologist who was watching her, died last March, a few days before the WHO team requested further investigation into the patient. It was not Covid-19 that caused his death, according to his wife, Roberta Massobrio.
The team under his leadership WHERE has suggested that other countries look for possible cases that preceded the first confirmed case, which was a resident of Uhan with the surname Chen, who fell ill in early December 2019. China has stated that its own part in terms of the WHO-led investigation has ended and has defied calls from the US, EU and WHO for further studies.
According to the report, examining the previous cases can help establish a timeline for the initial spread of the virus.
The Italian, who tested positive in June 2020, months after her illness, remains one of the most interesting initial cases.
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