The coronavirus was already in France on December 27 and not only from January 24, as previously believed. This is the preliminary conclusion reached by a medical study carried out by several French hospitals after re-analyzing the PCR tests carried out on patients with pneumonia during the months of December and January. This reopens the hypothesis that the coronavirus began to spread among humans earlier than previously thought.
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This report together with a similar one in the US has reacted to the World Health Organization (WHO), which has asked to investigate the suspected cases of the months of January, December, and even November, to identify possible previous COVID-19 infections. in the countries. “This will give a clearer picture” of the scope of the virus “before China notified it,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said at a news conference.
The head of intensive care at Avicenne de Bobigny and Jean Verdier de Bondy hospitals, Yves Cohen, explained in statements issued this Monday by France Info that thanks to a retrospective study of the PCR tests that were carried out on 24 patients admitted in those months with a picture of pneumonia, it was discovered that one of the cases was actually a positive in coronavirus.
It is, according to the chain BFMTV, from Amirouche Hammar a man who had not recently traveled abroad and who had no known job that he could have been infected with. In addition, the children have also suffered the same infection, but not the woman, who, despite having been asymptomatic, could be the origin of the infection in the family. She works at the fishmonger in a supermarket near one of the Paris airports where many international tourists go.
Until now, the arrival of a Frenchman of Chinese origin and two Chinese tourists to France on January 24 from the Chinese city of Wuhan were considered the first infections in France by coronavirus. Hammar’s positive is even before the first case identified in Europe, a German citizen infected by an acquaintance who visited Germany between January 19 and 22.
So this new case –Without a link to China and without having traveled abroad– suggests that it was already on European soil before, although, according to Yves Cohen, it cannot be claimed that he is Patient Zero in the country.
In addition, this contagion would be prior to the announcement made by the Chinese government on December 31, 2019 that a “pneumonia of unknown causes” had been detected in the areas surrounding the Wuhan seafood market, closed a day later. Although already in mid-December several market workers had to be admitted for symptoms similar to those of pneumonia. It was not until January 9 that this new coronavirus was later identified as SARS-CoV-2, which left its first death in Wuhan the night before.
Subsequent investigations have indicated that the first patient in China – who had no connection to the seafood market – started having symptoms in early December 2019. It is also suspected that there may have been cases in November and that China did not report them.
The case of the French citizen, of which the final results will be published next week in a scientific journal, is similar to one elaborated in the United States from which it emerged that the virus arrived in the country earlier than previously thought and that the first Coronavirus death occurred on February 6 in California, 23 days before the first announced death, which occurred in Washington state on February 29.
The WHO said on Tuesday “not be surprised” by these findings and insisted that countries investigate possible previous cases of pneumonia that occurred in late 2019. The organization’s spokesperson stressed that it would not be unusual for the coronavirus to be already out. from China at such an early date, “since the first cases of the disease date back to the beginning of December and it is possible that some of the infected traveled from Wuhan to other countries.”
In recent days, US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have again suggested that the coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan and that “they had a lot of evidence” to prove it, although they did not have shown the evidence. Instead, the WHO has denied the claims again and assures that it has animal origin, and that “it circulates in an ancestral way among bats”, according to the genetic analysis of the virus, something that the organization has already stated on previous occasions.
Anthoni Fauci, the main epidemiologist at the White House, in an interview in National Geographic collected by EFE, has ruled out Tuesday the Trump theory for the evolution of the coronavirus in bats, which would show that “it could not be artificially or deliberately manipulated” . What’s more, the head of US intelligence also denied Trump and explained in mid-April that there is no evidence that the virus was designed in a laboratory, but that it originated naturally.
