Italian professor repeats warning coronavirus may have spread outside China last year

Giuseppe Remuzzi’s comments were seized on by Chinese state media amid the acrimonious row with the US, but he says the key question is how far Covid-19 had spread before it was identified

Academic says ‘strange pneumonias’ in Italy last November suggest it may have reached Europe before anyone knew what the disease was

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Giuseppe Remuzzi told NPR there had been ‘strange pneumonias’ in Italy in November and December. Photo: Handout

Published: 11:22pm, 24 Mar 2020Updated: 8:13am, 25 Mar 2020

The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 may have spread beyond China before the health authorities had even discovered the disease, according to the Italian professor who recently said there had been “very strange pneumonias” in Europe as early as November last year.

The comments by Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, during an interview with US National Public Radio last week were quickly seized upon in the increasingly acrimonious blame game between Washington and Beijing.

Remuzzi’s comments attracted much attention in China, where the authorities have been working hard to steer the international narrative about the pandemic, and stop people describing it as the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” after the city where the disease was first identified.

In an interview with the Chinese science and technology news outlet DeepTech, which was published on Tuesday, Remuzzi said the key point in his NPR interview was not where the virus came from, but how far it had spread before it was discovered.

He said a major question was how long the disease, which has so far infected more than 378,000 and killed over 16,500 people worldwide, had been spreading in China before health authorities realised its severity.

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