Just move along.

eugyppius- The Earliest Days of the Italian Pandemic, or: Why Nobody Wants To Talk About February 2020 Anymore

And yet, as German and Italian public health officials traded accusations about where the first infections had really originated, contact tracers in Italy knew for a fact that Maestri was very far indeed from the origins of the European pandemic – closer to Patient 100,000 than to Patient 1.

By the end of February, the only places the virus is still accelerating, is in the still further outlying regions – places like Como, Mantova and Sondrio. It looks for all the world like the virus had burned through Milan without anybody noticing at all, and when the Tomas Pueyos of the world descended upon us with their mass testing and their lockdowns, they were a few months too late. The hotspots they found were secondary infection sites at best.

By the time pandemicists started rooting through their bag of tricks, the virus had been circulating for months with nobody noticing. This is one of the most crucial and eagerly ignored facts of the whole pandemic. Those early patients were hospitalised at very high rates and – in accordance with Chinese advice – subjected to aggressive mechanical ventilation, which killed a great many of them. Maestri, Patient 1, was a 38 year-old recreational marathoner, and he probably would’ve had far less trouble with SARS-2, had he not made the grave mistake of testing positive. Alas, he almost died after spending weeks on a ventilator.