Italy reports 27354 new coronavirus cases on Monday, 504 deaths

The study - published by NCI's scientific magazine Tumori Journal - found that 11.6% of blood samples from 959 healthy volunteers, who were enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020, had developed antibodies well before February.

The real surprise (and remember the study is yet to be peer-reviewed) was that they found antibodies in patients from as early as September 2019.

The results tend to show the appearance of antibodies in four patients during the first week of October 2019, thus suggesting that they had been infected with Covid-19 in September, Giovanni Apolone, co-author of the study, told Reuters.

Italy reported its first coronavirus cases in late January, after which an outbreak swept through the country, hitting northern areas such as the Lombardy region particularly hard.

"There is evidence SARS-CoV2 was in circulation in Italy in December 2019 based on the analysis of wastewater", Professor Francois Balloux, director of the University College London Genetics Institute, wrote on Twitter.

"It means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for a long time and with a low rate of lethality, not because it is disappearing, only to surge again", he said.

Peru's Merino Resigns Five Days After Taking Office
Peru has the world's highest per-capita COVID-19 mortality rate and has seen one of Latin America's worst economic contractions. Despite the election of a new congress in January, there have still been repeated clashes between the president and congress.

And multiple theories have emerged about when and how virus outbreaks may have been seeded on the West Coast last fall, with cases only first identified here as COVID-19 in late January.

In March, Italian researchers reported a higher-than-average number of cases of severe pneumonia and flu outside Milan in the last quarter of 2019 - an early sign that the virus could have been spreading well before the outbreak.

Infections in Italy since the disease first came to light in February total 1.107 million, while 44,139 people have now died because of the coronavirus.

Italy has registered 33,979 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Sunday, down from 37,255 on Saturday.

There were another 546 COVID-related deaths, up from 544 the day before.