The virus had been there all along, once you test it, you get it.
Realise Italy did not rise as crazily as US.
Italy is in total lockdown, U.S. is not, still based on each state's decision to shut down or not. Heck people still go outside.
No the virus had not been there all along in US. It was originated in China. Heck, even Chinese researchers predict it could happen again prior to that. This is a research paper in March of 2019.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/
Viruses. 2019 Mar; 11(3): 210.
Published online 2019 Mar 2. doi:
10.3390/v11030210
PMCID: PMC6466186
PMID:
30832341
Bat Coronaviruses in China
Yi Fan,1,2
Kai Zhao,1,2
Zheng-Li Shi,1,2 and
Peng Zhou1,2,*
Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer
During the past two decades, three zoonotic coronaviruses have been identified as the cause of large-scale disease outbreaks–Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Swine Acute Diarrhea Syndrome (SADS). SARS and MERS emerged in 2003 and 2012, respectively, and caused a worldwide pandemic that claimed thousands of human lives, while SADS struck the swine industry in 2017. They have common characteristics, such as they are all highly pathogenic to humans or livestock, their agents originated from bats, and two of them originated in China. Thus, it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China. Therefore, the investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs, which in turn minimizes the impact of such future outbreaks in China. The purpose of the review is to summarize the current knowledge on viral diversity, reservoir hosts, and the geographical distributions of bat coronaviruses in China, and eventually we aim to predict virus hotspots and their cross-species transmission potential.
Fifteen years after the first highly pathogenic human coronavirus caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) outbreak, another severe acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV) devastated livestock production by causing fatal diseases in pigs. Both outbreaks began in China and were caused by coronaviruses of bat origin [
1,
2]. This increased the urgency to study bat coronaviruses in China to understand their potential of causing another virus outbreak.
In this review, we collected information from past epidemiology studies on bat coronaviruses in China, including the virus species identified, their host species, and their geographical distributions. We also discuss the future prospects of bat coronaviruses cross-species transmission and spread in China.
