First French case of COVID-19 occurred in December, a month earlier than previously thought
pharmafile | May 5, 2020 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â COVID-19, coronavirusÂ
A French patient who suffered from pneumonia in December actually had COVID-19, it has been revealed.
Dr Yves Cohen, the head of emergency medicine at Avicenne and Jean-Verdier hospitals near Paris, said that a swab that was taken at the time was recently tested and came back positive for coronavirus.
The patient was a 43 year old man from Bobigny in the north east of Paris. He said he had not travelled abroad, which indicates he caught the virus in Paris. This also highlights that local transmission occurred far earlier than previously thought.
Dr Cohen told the BBC that the patient must have been infected between 14 and 22 December, due to COVID-19 symptoms taking five to 14 days to appear. The patient was admitted to hospital on 27 December with a dry cough, a fever and a shortness of breath.
The patient’s children had also fallen ill, but his wife did not display any symptoms. The patient’s wife worked at a supermarket near the Charles de Gaulle airport where she could have come into contact with people who had recently arrived from China. She may have been asymptomatic and passed it onto her family.
France’s first official cases were confirmed on 24 January. Out of the first three confirmed cases, two had been to Wuhan where the outbreak was first detected. The first human-to-human transmission in Europe was reported in Germany, where a German man was infected by a Chinese colleague who had visited the country between the 19 and 22 January.
These recent revelations indicate COVID-19 could have been present across Europe far earlier than reported.
Conor Kavanagh
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