This is Toby Sumpter with your CrossPolitic Daily News Brief for Tuesday, May 5, 2020.
France Confirms First Covid Case was at the End of December
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france-idUSKBN22G20L
PARIS (Reuters) – A French hospital which has retested old samples from pneumonia patients discovered that it treated a man who had COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases.
Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, told BFM TV that scientists had retested samples from 24 patients treated in December and January who tested negative for the flu. “Of the 24, we had one who was positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 27,” he told the news channel on Sunday.
Each sample was retested several times to ensure there were no errors, he added. Neither Cohen nor his team were immediately available for comment on Monday.
France, which has seen almost 25,000 people die from the virus since March 1, confirmed its first three COVID-19 cases on Jan. 24, including two patients in Paris and another in the southwestern city of Bordeaux.
Cohen said it was too early to know if the patient whose Dec. 27 test was COVID-19 positive is France’s “patient zero”. Knowing who was the first is critical to understanding how the virus spread.
Cohen said the patient had survived and that a first investigation to trace the first contamination has been carried out.
“He was sick for 15 days and infected his two children, but not his wife, who works in a supermarket.
“He was amazed, he didn’t understand how he had been infected. We put the puzzle together and he had not made any trips. The only contact that he had was with his wife.”
The man’s wife worked alongside a Sushi stand, close to colleagues of Chinese origin, Cohen said. It was not clear whether those colleagues had travelled to China, and the local health authority should investigate, he said.
This is Toby Sumpter with Crosspolitic News. You can find this show and all the others on the
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