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May 6, 2020

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France may have had the virus in December

Source: AP | 00:00 UTC+8 May 6, 2020 | Print Edition

FRENCH scientists say they may have identified a possible case of the new coronavirus dating back to December — about a month before the first cases were officially confirmed in Europe.

In a study published in the International Journal of Microbial Agents, doctors at a hospital north of Paris reviewed retrospective samples of 14 patients treated for atypical pneumonia between early December and mid-January. Among those were the records of Amirouche Hammar, a fishmonger in his 40s from Algeria who has lived in France for years and had no recent travel history.

Hammar told French broadcaster BFM-TV yesterday that he drove himself to a hospital emergency unit at 5am one morning in late December because he felt very sick, with chest pains and breathing difficulties.

“They said, ‘Perhaps you have an infection, a pulmonary infection, although it’s not certain. But what you have is very serious, very serious, because you are coughing blood. It’s not normal flu,’” he said.

Hammar was admitted to the hospital with symptoms doctors say were consistent with COVID-19 patients in China and Italy. One of his children had also gotten sick with an unusual pneumonia shortly before Hammar fell ill. When doctors retested Hammar’s old sample, they found it was positive for the coronavirus.

“Identifying the first infected patient is of great epidemiological interest as it changes dramatically our knowledge” regarding the spread of the coronavirus, wrote Dr Yves Cohen, one of the French researchers. An intensive care specialist, Cohen works in the northern suburbs of Paris where Hammar lives and which have been particularly hard-hit by COVID-19 infections and deaths.

Cohen told BFM-TV that when Hammar sought treatment in December, they figured he was simply suffering from a form of viral pneumonia that they couldn’t put their finger on.

There doesn’t appear to have been any further transmission of the virus from Hammar, who later recovered after being treated with antibiotics in the ICU. Cohen and colleagues suggested their results showed there could be many other unidentified coronavirus cases from before the disease was officially detected in Europe.

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