Looks like it arrived in Italy at the end of December.
At the end of December, an uncommon number of pneumonia cases arrived at the hospital of Codogno in northern Italy, the head of the emergency ward, Stefano Paglia, told the newspaper La Repubblica. Some of these patients could carry the coronavirus, but doctors treated them as typical winter diseases.
Unfortunately, a decisive contribution to the spread of the infection was given by the health facility itself, due to the amount of medical staff and attendees going through the compound daily.
Nearly 6,000 test positive for novel coronavirus as the southern European nation struggles to contain outbreak.
www.aljazeera.com
That article leaps from one subject to another, its a shame this bit wasnt discussed more. I wish I could read Italian, I will see what I can find with machine translation but it isnt easy.
Something may be getting misconstrued.....
With a previously unseen outbreak of a novel disease, it is usually down to clinical features that stick out, or sheer number of cases, to actually trigger the alarm. Since so many respiratory diseases have similar symptoms, its often the latter, along with testing negative for other explanations, perhaps combined with failure of patients to respond to treatments that normally have a better success.
And I am someone who remains flexible in my thinking about timescales. I dont like to rule out the possibility that cases were missed all over the place in periods earlier than people would generally think possible.
So yes, I'm going to take note when things like that are said. And even accounting for Italys population demographics and possibly quite large variations in surveillance and testing in other countries, Italy does appear to be further along in terms of their own epidemic than most other places in europe so far.
But we can use the numbers from a later period to work backwards to approximate likely starting points. I havent dont this for Italy, but if there was an outbreak much earlier there that lead to notable levels of pneumonia by the end of December, I dont see how it would then have taken so long since then for them to end up in the current situation in terms of number of hospitalisations and deaths.
Therefore without more data, I intend to back off from reading too much into those comments. Especially since I have made a brief attempt to find other sources for comments by Stefano Paglia, and got this:
ALL News
en24.news
Why then did the Codogno hospital prove to be the outbreak of Covid-19?
“In the area, the coronavirus, without being able to be detected, had been circulating since at least January. By the end of December, anticipating the winter overcrowding plan, I had increased the beds of the intensive short observation to 18. The general practitioners recorded a boom in pneumonia: we prepared without waiting for funding. ”
This might not be intending to imply that the 'boon in pneuomonia' was Covid-19 related at all, or it might, its really hard to tell, and there is no explicit detail about exactly what date the 'boom' began. And from that version of his comments, it would be better to say January than December. There are plenty of other reasons to expect to have a bunch of pneumonia cases turning up at that time of year and to need to quickly respond by adding capacity. I dont really want to have to try to find flu & pneuomonia data for that period in Italy right now, but thats where I would be trying to look if I was intent on checking this stuff to the best of my ability.
