By Aurelien Breeden
PARIS — French doctors say they just discovered that a patient treated in late December north of Paris had the coronavirus, a finding that, if verified, suggests that the virus appeared in Europe nearly a month earlier than previously understood.
The finding came this week after French doctors retested samples taken on Dec. 27 from a patient who had pneumonia — days before Chinese authorities first reported the previously unknown virus to the World Health Organisation, and weeks before the Chinese acknowledged that human-to-human transmission of the virus was even possible.
It was nearly a month before the disease was first officially acknowledged to have emerged in France.
The doctors who made the finding said they tested the samples twice to avoid false positives. But they acknowledged that they could not completely rule out that possibility.
They also cautioned that it was unclear whether the man, if the tests were accurate, had passed the virus on to anyone else.
The French government did not comment on the case on Tuesday.
The new case may add to an understanding of how late authorities in Europe were in recognising that the virus had arrived in their midst and in fashioning a full-throttle response.
It also suggests that the virus had made its way out of Asia, let alone China, long before measures to cut it off and contain its spread. The first case outside of China was reported in Thailand on Jan. 13.
The detection of the new case in France comes as doctors in the United States have documented deaths from the virus weeks earlier than initially reported, and a model has suggested that silent outbreaks had spread for weeks before detection.
The new French case was found at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals, in the northern suburbs of Paris. Dr. Yves Cohen, the head of intensive care at those hospitals said on Sunday that his staff had decided to test samples from patients diagnosed with atypical pneumonia in December and January for the coronavirus.
At the time, the patients had been checked for seasonal flu and for other coronaviruses, but not for the new coronavirus, which was little known and not thought to have reached Europe.
Dr. Cohen told the BFM TV news channel that the doctors detected one case of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, from a Dec. 27 sample, adding that the sample had been tested several times to rule out a false positive.
The patient, a 42-year-old man born in Algeria who has lived in France for many years, had not been abroad since August, according to Dr. Cohen and others, whose study of the case has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
“He could be patient zero, but maybe there were others in other regions,” Dr. Cohen said, meaning the first person to be infected with the virus in France.
It is not yet entirely clear how the man caught the infection. But experts have long suspected that the coronavirus may have spread internationally before the first officially reported cases.
France’s health ministry said on Tuesday that authorities were in contact with scientists and experts from other countries on the timeline of the spread of the virus, and that they would carry out further investigations “if they appear necessary.”
•New York Times
