Comment: This almost certainly means it did NOT originate in China and has been circulating around the world for many months - albeit perhaps in its most recently mutated forms.
Wuhan - like Bergamo, central Iran and Madrid - just happens then to have been a 'hotspot', presumably due to a number of LOCAL factors.
Giuseppe Remuzzi, the director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, lets the cat out of the bag: "Doctors have been seeing very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people, in December, and even November"
"They [general practitioners] remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November," Giuseppe Remuzzi, the director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, said in an interview with the National Public Radio of the United States.
"This means that the virus was circulating, at least in [the northern region of] Lombardy and before we were aware of this outbreak occurring in China."
Remuzzi's comments came as scientists continue to search for the origin of the coronavirus. Chinese respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan said earlier that although China was the first to report the pathogen, it was not yet certain where it actually came from.
Comment: China basically cracked a global problem that Western authorities - doctors included - were oblivious about till January. For that, they're getting slammed as 'virus terrorists'.
Remuzzi said it was only recently that he had heard from Italian doctors about the disease, which meant it had existed and been spreading without people's knowledge.
Despite reporting its first locally transmitted coronavirus infections - in Lombardy - only on February 21 - it had only imported cases before then - Italy has since had more than 53,000 confirmed cases and 4,825 deaths from Covid-19, the disease caused by the pathogen. By comparison, China has had just over 81,000 cases and 3,261 fatalities.
Italy suspended all flights to China on January 31, the first nation to do so.
Comment: That, like all other containment measures, turned out to be utterly pointless. This virus has been EVERYWHERE for a long time.
In the central China city of Wuhan, where the epidemic was first identified, doctors began noticing a "pneumonia with an unknown cause" in December. The first known infection in the city can be traced back to December 1. A report by the South China Morning Post said that the first Chinese case might have been as early as mid-November, but that has not been confirmed by Beijing.
The current thinking among the scientific community is that the first infection in Lombardy was the result of an Italian coming into contact with a Chinese person in late January. However, if it can be shown that the novel coronavirus - officially known as SARS-CoV-2 - was in circulation in Italy in November, then that theory would be turned on its head.
The debate over the possible origin of the pathogen has also been at the heart of a war of words between Beijing and Washington, with US President Donald Trump repeatedly referring to it as the "Chinese virus" and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling it the "Wuhan virus", infuriating Beijing in the process.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian took to Twitter to contest the claims.
"By calling it 'China virus' and thus suggesting its origin without any supporting facts or evidence, some media clearly want China to take the blame, and their ulterior motives are laid bare," he said.
He then went on to suggest that the coronavirus outbreak might have started in the United States and been carried to Wuhan by the US Army.
Comment: A question remains: why is this affecting one province (Bergamo) of one region (Lombardy) of northern Italy so badly?
We don't have the answer to that, but it's noteworthy that China took this seriously enough to take the measures it did in Wuhan, and to identify the culprit ('COVID-19'), and to crack its genome, and to inform the world about it, including what did and did not work to mitigate its effects and save however many lives.
Italy, the EU, the US, NATO, and the haughty 'Western Order', did NOT.
Incidentally, this revelation of a 'strange pneumonia outbreak' last Fall fits with our own direct experience. One of our editors contracted what we suspected was 'cryptogenic pneumonia' - which is a cover-all term experts use for 'pneumonia of unknown origin' - in early December.
Several physicians, however, couldn't diagnose it, believing instead that what they were seeing in lung scans was cancer. Biopsies, however, ruled this out. Even then they would NOT consider a viral source!
Coronavirus may very well have been out among the world population for much longer than thought. If that's the case, it shows just how groundless the current fear panic is - and worse, how it's being driven by nefarious geopolitical and social engineering interests.