Italy in November 2019?

Doctors in Italy have found a skin sample from a patient in Milan who had Covid-19 a month before the outbreak was first detected in Wuhan.

I have no clue what this means about the origins of the disease, the genetics seem to point to bats nearby, but it does add a kink to the storyline:

In the quest to understand how the Covid-19 pandemic began, one persistent mystery is an Italian woman who researchers say they can no longer find.

Members of a World Health Organization-led team studying the origins of the virus want to investigate the case of a 25-year-old Milan resident who in November 2019 visited a hospital with a sore throat and skin lesions: symptoms of a disease that wouldn’t be discovered in the city of Wuhan in China for another month. She left behind a skin sample, smaller than a dime, that in two tests conducted more than six months later yielded traces of the Covid-19 virus, according to research published in January by the British Journal of Dermatology.

Additional studies of the woman’s case, scientists say, could help determine how long the virus was circulating in China and elsewhere before a cluster of cases erupted at Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market in December 2019. The Covid-19-positive skin sample, sitting in wax in a researcher’s office in Milan, is an example of the scattered clues about the pandemic’s early days that the WHO-led investigation is pursuing outside of China, where the pandemic began.

The problem, researchers say, is that none of them know who or where she is. Milan’s Policlinico hospital and the University of Milan, which oversaw her case, said they don’t have her details. Raffaele Gianotti, the dermatologist who treated her, died in March, days before the WHO-led team asked for more research into his patient. Covid-19 didn’t cause his death, said his wife, Roberta Massobrio.

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Examining earlier suspected cases could help establish a timeline of the virus’s early spread, scientists say. If genetic material can be recovered, they say it could help them determine how the earliest cases might be related.

As Alice would say, "Curiouser and Curiouser."