According to the South China Morning Post, a “strange pneumonia” was circulating in northern Italy as long ago as November 2019, weeks before doctors were made aware of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China

“They [general practitioners] remember having seen very strange pneumonia, very severe, particularly in old people in December and even November,” Giuseppe Remuzzi, the director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, said in an interview with National Public Radio.

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