France finds victim from last year
A patient hospitalized with flu-like symptoms at the end of December in France turned out to have had COVID-19, a finding that suggests the new coronavirus was spreading there at least a month earlier than official records show.
The 42-year-old fishmonger showed up at a hospital near Paris on Dec. 27 with a cough, headache and fever, and was treated with antibiotics and discharged after two days.
Doctors found he had COVID-19 by retroactively testing his respiratory samples along with those from a handful of hospitalized patients, describing their work in a case report.
The finding contradicts official statistics, which show the first COVID-19 cases in France occurred in people who returned from Wuhan, China, at the end of January.
They also raise questions about how the patient was infected.
Virologists who studied the main strains of the virus circulating in France last month concluded that they probably didn’t come directly from China or Italy, and had been spreading undocumented for some time.
“Identifying the first infected patient is of great epidemiological interest as it changes dramatically our knowledge regarding SarsCoV-2 and its spreading in the country,” Yves Cohen, head of intensive care at two large hospitals northeast of Paris, and colleagues wrote in the report. “Moreover, the absence of a link with China and the lack of recent travel suggest that the disease was already spreading among the French population at the end of December.”
The researchers said official numbers, which peg COVID19 cases at 203,253 in France, probably underestimate the disease’s impact, and that their findings could “change our understanding of the dynamic of the epidemic.”