... But what is the connection between Italy and the novel coronavirus considering the deadly virus is reported to have originated from China? The answer is fashionably simple. The northern part of Italy has been a traditionally prosperous region due to the flourishing fashion and garment industry. Most of the big global brands like Gucci and Prada have their base in this region. With China offering one of the cheapest manufacturing options in the world, it came as little surprise that most of these fashion brands were working with China. A large number of these Italian fashion and garment houses had outsourced their manufacturing to Chinese labour, specifically in Wuhan. Italy also has direct flights from Wuhan and reports suggest over 100,000 Chinese citizens were working in Italian factories. Chinese made a slow and steady move into Italy and many Italian fashion firms are now owned by them as well. As per a news report, there are more than 300,000 Chinese and over 90% of them work in the Italian garment industry.
Exponential growth takes some time at the start before it is noticeable. And then it's unmanageable.
Look at the time between the first and the second wave in Italy or France. It took a few months to become uncontrolled again after the lockdown was lifted. So before it was exploding in northern Italy around February it likely needed a few months of spreading throughout society too.
But this coronavirus is not capable of exponential growth. It does spread quickly, but not that quickly. The most well known exponential growth model of SARS-CoV2 infections is the Imperial College model which has proven to be at least one order of magnitude off in its predictions. The most accurate model of SARS-CoV2 spread currently available is that published by Michael Levitt which predicts SARS-CoV2 comes well short of exponential spread even in worst case scenarios. The only reason we thought there was exponential growth is because the beginning of the epidemic was so poorly understood.
Of course it's not really exponential. And even the simplest SIR toy model does not output an exponential solution, except as an aproximation at the start. My point was simply that it took several months between very low numbers at the end of the first lockdown and the decision to put a second albeit lighter lockdown in France and (at least parts of) Italy. So one should not be surprised that the virus was circulating for several months before the problem became really noticeable in february.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 9.9 ms ] thread- one of the early indicators is the parking lots of Wuhan hospitals being full in aerial fotos in Oct:
https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-data-suggests...
- Wuhan (and Shanghai) have international airports.
So it's either a possibility, or instrument contamination.
Here's a paper suggesting that
> SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09248...
... But what is the connection between Italy and the novel coronavirus considering the deadly virus is reported to have originated from China? The answer is fashionably simple. The northern part of Italy has been a traditionally prosperous region due to the flourishing fashion and garment industry. Most of the big global brands like Gucci and Prada have their base in this region. With China offering one of the cheapest manufacturing options in the world, it came as little surprise that most of these fashion brands were working with China. A large number of these Italian fashion and garment houses had outsourced their manufacturing to Chinese labour, specifically in Wuhan. Italy also has direct flights from Wuhan and reports suggest over 100,000 Chinese citizens were working in Italian factories. Chinese made a slow and steady move into Italy and many Italian fashion firms are now owned by them as well. As per a news report, there are more than 300,000 Chinese and over 90% of them work in the Italian garment industry.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...