Hunt for Italy’s coronavirus patient zero finds a case in November 2019
- Peer-reviewed research shows the virus was present in a stored skin sample taken from a Milan woman with a mysterious illness
- Doctors remembered her when they started to see similar rashes in some Covid-19 patients
Raffaele Gianotti, a dermatopathologist with the University of Milan, said Sars-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – had been found in the 25-year-old woman’s preserved skin tissue. She was misdiagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder, but could now be Italy’s “patient zero”.
“Our patient could represent the oldest case in literature of detection of the virus on tissue samples,” Gianotti and his collaborators from Spain and Britain said in a peer-reviewed paper published in the British Journal of Dermatology last Thursday.
“Could this case be Italy’s patient zero?”
According to the researchers, the woman had a sore throat but no other symptoms and a thorough examination gave no clue as to the cause of the skin irritation. Her doctors drilled into the rash and obtained a core sample of skin tissue. Finding nothing, they refrigerated the sample.