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A small town in Italy appears to have wiped out coronavirus — with zero new cases this week — after an experiment that called for widespread testing, according to a report.
Researchers wrote in an op-ed for the Guardian that the northern town of Vò started testing all 3,000 residents on March 6 after it became home to the country’s first coronavirus death.
University of Padua professor Andrea Crisanti and Antonio Cassone, who is the former director of the department of infectious diseases at the Italian institute of health, said the pilot study involved testing even residents who didn’t show symptoms of the virus.
“We made an interesting finding: at the time the first symptomatic case was diagnosed, a significant proportion of the population, about 3%, had already been infected — yet most of them were completely asymptomatic,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers said the practice “established a valuable principle: testing of all citizens, whether or not they have symptoms, provides a way to control this pandemic.”
“This allowed us to quarantine people before they showed signs of infection and stop the further spread of coronavirus,” the researchers wrote.
The result was testing was able to help eradicate the spread of the virus in under 14 days, the report said.
Researchers noted that the study would be “impossible” to replicate throughout the coronavirus-ravaged country due to the number of tests that would need to be performed.
But they said the findings could help inform other policies as the country navigates the pandemic.
“The government could identify and isolate clusters, quarantine everyone affected, trace their recent contacts, and quarantine and isolate them, too — whether they had symptoms or not,” researchers said.
Italy is facing at least 53,578 cases of the virus as the death toll climbs past 4,800, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.



