key: cord-276969-mdry8qzv
authors: Chirumbolo, Salvatore
title: Might the many positive COVID19 subjects in Italy have been caused by resident bat‐derived zoonotic β‐coronaviruses instead of the Wuhan (China) outbreak?
date: 2020-03-27
journal: J Med Virol
DOI: 10.1002/jmv.25777
sha: 
doc_id: 276969
cord_uid: mdry8qzv

nan

Might the many positive COVID19 subjects in Italy have been caused by resident bat-derived zoonotic β-coronaviruses instead of the Wuhan (China) outbreak?

To the Editor, Italy surely comes from a Wuhan-borne genotype and/or a Chinese outbreak. The same authors concluded that the SARS-CoV2 in Italy might be present at least since September and October 2019, much before the claimed Wuhan outbreak. 1 According to the World Health Organization evaluation, SARS-CoV2 outbreaks in Europe occurred much before in Germany and France respect to Italy. Therefore, it might be presumed that a significant proportion of Italians were infected by SARS-CoV2 in times greatly preceding the Government dispositions upon the cases enumeration. The daily differences between cases in the highest emergence period, that is, 1 to 9 March 2020, plotted a linear rather than an exponential trend. As x increases (1 day each), y values (cases number) increases by the same amount (1.2 or +20%) (Shapiro-Wilk's exp test P = .442857). This possibly suggests that rhinopharyngeal swabs are catching homogeneous clusters of cases from dating back homogeneously, normally distributed preinfected population, depending also on an established maximal number of analyzed swabs for the day.

Questions may be raised, therefore, if, taking into account the genomic distance (or similarity) and the RNA-virus mutation rate, the "Italian" SARS-CoV2 might be the evolutionary balanced genotype (or strain) from a resident zoonotic spillover.

The authors reported their conclusions by taking into account coalescent analysis and a birth-death method to estimate the SARS-CoV2 ancestor and establish unequivocally the origin of pandemics. 1 Despite the trivial observation that a common reader of these issues may raise that is, that genetic divergence cannot be confused with a phylogenetic difference, RNA viruses mutation rate and their maintenance in the population structure or the balancing selection must be debated with great caution. 2 It is well known that, particularly for viral pathogens, their ecological (genetic) and evolutionary dynamics may occur in the same timescale where potential cross interactions represent a fundamental hallmark. As regards RNA viruses, such as coronaviruses, the nucleotide mutation rate is at least a million times higher respect to a vertebrate, frequently recombine their genomes, between animals and humans, and are therefore highly pushed by evolutionary selection to adapt and survive in the animal-human coexisting population. 3 This should suggest that the cross-talk between evolution and epidemiology is closely intertwined, causing that the maintenance of an onward transmission might be crucially as- The issue of human coronaviruses virulence was recently addressed for SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV and some reports have outlined the role of coronavirus E protein in triggering an inflammatory response, cytokine storm, and/or inhibition of the innate immunity with dampening Th1 interferon-γ signaling. 4 In this context, alarming claims may appear completely justified, despite the fact that for SARS pandemics was not announced an alarming concern as doing currently. In this respect, authorities should inform the social collectivity about the correct patients' stratification, how many hospitalized because of COVID19 and how many deaths because of COVID19.

SARS-CoV2 genome shares about 70% similarity with SARS coronavirus 5 but probably, its completely new emergence via the mechanism of jumping species, is not a novelty in the biology of human Beta-coronaviridae. Table 1 Prato, accounting on about 18% Chinese individuals, appeared to have a very low number of people purported to have contracted the SARS-CoV2. 10 Besides China, a spillover of zoonotic pathogens from wildlife was reported also in Italy from bats. 11 In Italy, the association be- (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum L), has been recently reported. 9, 12 Lelli et al 13 

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