Coronavirus latest: The outbreak in Italy went undetected for weeks
Updates on the respiratory illness that has infected hundreds of thousands of people and killed several thousand.
25 March 1:00 GMT — The outbreak in Italy went undetected for weeks
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was in Northern Italy as early as 1 January.
An epidemiological analysis of Lombardy, the epicentre of the outbreak in Italy, reveals that the first onset of symptoms in the country occurred weeks before the disease was reported there on 20 February. The study looks at nearly 6,000 laboratory-confirmed cases to track how the outbreak unfolded in the region. It was posted to the arXiv preprint server on 20 March.
