> the September 2019 detection in Italy of covid 19 (screened lung tissue samples)
That study was sheer utter fucking crap. They rolled their own antibody test, didn't do any false-positive testing, claimed to find D614G circulating then, and that it was commonly occurring in respiratory samples, during a time when Italy didn't have any excess deaths. It is literally dumb as fuck.
The wastewater in early Dec seems to be good, matches the timeline of the pandemic, leading the wave of deaths by only a couple months, it only claims low levels of cryptic spread and was done by a totally separate group.
Is there a link to the full study and peer review?
I wish I could find the original dissection and conclusions in 2020, but I don't recall the positive count being common. I don't recall where on the web I read the study in full and all I find about it on the web atm is somewhat limited. [1] [2]
The findings were inconvenient to the lab theory cabal who have attempted to sweep away any noise that doesn't agree with their train of thought and attempts in the media, one being quite amateurish effort that needed delicate retraction where the noise the week before was being descriped along the lines as some time ago ...
It would have been smart if WHO investigated to determine the variation in those samples to the Alpha strain which was detected in Wuhan. Clearly for a virus detected in 2019 that wasn't spreading much or rather benign, it wasn't the Alpha stain.
There was a study in early/mid 2020 that tried to identify groups of mutations (what we now call "variants") and track their spread and severity over time. It found that most likely there was a mutation that started in or around Italy that increased the severity to the point excess death was easily detected, that then spread around the world. It was even noticeable in how it affected the US east and west coast differently, because the original out-of-Wuhan virus wasn't as severe.
It was using identifiers like L, LL, and M; does this sound familiar to anyone?
That early finding would completely explain the study you linked to.
> SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) individuals, starting from September 2019 (14%),
14% prevalence in September 2019 is batshit insane, the old folks homes would have been morgues, and they weren't.
and anyone that tries to argue that it was some cryptic non-virulent progenitor that would mean that a large amount of Italy's population would have been exposed and developed T-cells before Feb 2020 which would have blunted the effect of the pandemic (acting like a vaccination) which clearly didn't happen.
[T-cell epitope escape is something that we still don't observe years later]
> The serologic assay used in this study is an in-house designed RBD-based ELISA
They rolled their own assay, and don't provide any controls against false positives (a problem that plagued early antibody testing)
This study is very likely a clumsy effort paid for by China in an attempt to argue that the virus did not originate in China at all.
> Out of the 87 samples reviewed, three were found by both laboratories to be positive for IgM. The first dated back to Oct. 10, 2019, in Lombardy.
> But Erasmus' criteria required all three coronavirus-linked antibodies - IgM, neutralising antibodies and IgG - to be identified, and none of the samples fulfilled that requirement.
Reuters plays that off as he-said-she-said, but the Dutch have a much stronger position there. The requirement that all three indicators turn positive is a good control against random false positives due to cross reactivity. And they completely falsified 25 of 29 other positive samples.
Thanks and that's a heck of a curve ball on my view of this study. IIRC it's not the same study I recall written up before peer review and read back in late 2020 but it's left me wondering how it could be. Sometimes I don't pay the closest attention for instance the last couple of days I missed the word antibodies meant human derived versions not what an antigen developed to hone in on covid proteins which an elisa test would detect. (ie for covid detection in the wild where there the human population is not significant compared to the host species.) Obviously there's not two studies regarding the lung tissue samples, so that leaves me in a bit of a WTF moment, did I misread whatever I read in 2020 badly, since surely I would have binned it once I saw mention of IgG and IgM. What I recall looking over how they had used elisa not for human antibodies but for antigens to specific protein sequences unique to covid 19. The result was a single set of figures with iirc nothing over 1% until at least early 2020.
At the time I thought it a clever means to track the presence of a non infective / benign virus before it reached an infective stage - pre Wuhan and wondered what exotic pets or animals people had unwittingly exposed themselves to - obviously lung tissue is a sponge of sorts.
If they were testing for human derived antibodies, IgG and IgM blood samples from blood banks makes more sense.
I would now guess the supposed high IgG and IgM detection is probably why WHO ignored this study and or sloppy work on the researchers and labs part.
That study was sheer utter fucking crap. They rolled their own antibody test, didn't do any false-positive testing, claimed to find D614G circulating then, and that it was commonly occurring in respiratory samples, during a time when Italy didn't have any excess deaths. It is literally dumb as fuck.
The wastewater in early Dec seems to be good, matches the timeline of the pandemic, leading the wave of deaths by only a couple months, it only claims low levels of cryptic spread and was done by a totally separate group.