‘VIRUS IN FRANCE HAS LOCAL TRACES’

NEW DELHI: The coronavirus outbreak in France was not caused by cases imported from China, but from a locally circulating strain of unknown origin, according to a new study reported by local media.

The study, published by virologists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said the French strain may have been circulating locally and unrecognised before the global outbreak accelerated, French public radio network RFI said in a report on its website.

“Tests on samples from 97 French and three Algerians infected with Sars-CoV-2 suggest that the virus may have been around in France before the pandemic started,” it said.

Genetic analysis of the samples revealed that the dominant types of viral strains in France belonged to a group with a common ancestor that did not come from either China or Italy, it said, citing the 16-page study that was first reported by South

China Morning Post newspaper.

“The French outbreak has been mainly seeded by one or several variants of this clade (group) … we can infer that the virus was silently circulating in France in February,” the SCMP quoted researchers led by Dr Sylvie van der Werf and Etienne Simon-Loriere as saying.

The research was published in a non-peer reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org.

The earliest sample in the French clade was collected on 19 February from a patient who had no travel history and no known contact with returned travellers.

However, “current sampling clearly prevents reliable inference for the timing of introduction in France,” making it impossible to conclude that the virus existed in France even before it was discovered in China, the researchers said.

France detected the virus in late January, before any other country in Europe. HTC