Italy and the COVID-19 Emergency

On 1 December 2019, a case of pneumonia of unknown aetiology was diagnosed in the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, China. From 2 to 8 December, other cases of pneumonia of unknown aetiology were detected in the South China Seafood Market in the same town, and frontline medical workers reported these cases to the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. In reaction to these warnings, the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a team of experts from Fudan University were put in charge of obtaining the genome sequence of the new virus (Liu et al. 2020). At the end of December, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported the situation to the National Health Commission and declared publicly that there was no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission of the virus. At the same time, the WHO China Country Office was informed about different cases of pneumonia. A few days after WHO had been notified, the National Health Commission sent a group of experts to Wuhan to investigate the situation, just before the genome sequence of the virus had been obtained. The team of Chinese virologists identified the virus as a new kind of coronavirus (labelled ‘2019-nCo V’) on 7 January, and the genetic sequence was finally sent to the World Health Organization on 9 January 2020 (He et al. 2020).