Italy, by dint of its early and widespread exposure to the virus, has an opportunity to gain insight into how the virus works and the biological properties that protect against it. Nowhere in Italy is the pursuit of the antibody strategy more intense than in Veneto. Vo’ also has a relatively homogeneous genetic pool, which may facilitate research, and it has been widely tested. After the outbreak, officials there took the extraordinary step of swab-testing the entire population of 3,000, including people without symptoms. That helped eliminate an outbreak, and now officials plan to carry out antibody testing and genome sequencing on the entire population to detect patterns in who was and was not susceptible to the virus.

Source: New York Times April 04, 2020 09:00 UTC