Could the new coronavirus have infected humans prior November 2019?

Abstract

The pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is believed to originate in China from where it spread to other parts of the world. The first cluster of diseased individuals was reported in China as early as in December 2019. It has also been well established that the virus stroke Italy later in January or in February 2020, hence distinctly after the outbreak in China. The work by Apolone et al. published in the Italian Medical Journal in November 2020 and retracted upon expression of concern on 22 March 2021, however propose that the virus could have stroke people already in September 2019, possibly following even earlier outbreak in China. By fitting an early part of the epidemic curve with the exponential and extrapolating it backwards, we could estimate the day-zero of the epidemic and calculated its confidence intervals in Italy and China. We also calculated how probable it is that Italy encountered the virus prior 1 January 2020. We determined an early portion of the epidemic curve representing unhindered exponential growth which fit the exponential model with high determination >0.97 in both countries. We conservatively suggest that the day-zero in China and Italy was 8 December 2019 (95% CI: 3 Dec., 20 Dec.) and 22 January 2020 (95% CI: 16 Jan., 29 Jan.), respectively. Given the uncertainty of the very early data in China and adjusting hence our model to fit the exponentially behaved data only, we can even admit that the pandemic originated through November 2019 (95% CI: 31 Oct., 22 Dec.). With high confidence (p <0.01) China encountered the virus prior Italy. We generally view any pre-pandemic presence of the virus in humans before November 2019 as very unlikely. The later established dynamics of the epidemics data suggests that the country of the origin was China.