A patient hospitalized with flu-like symptoms at the end of December in France turned out to have had Covid-19, a finding that suggests the new coronavirus was spreading there at least a month earlier than official records show.
The 42-year-old fishmonger showed up at a hospital near Paris on Dec. 27 with a cough, headache and fever and was treated with antibiotics and discharged after two days. Doctors found he had Covid-19 by retroactively testing his respiratory samples along with those from a handful of hospitalized patients, describing their work in a case report.
The finding contradicts official statistics, which show the first Covid-19 cases in France occurred in people who returned from Wuhan, China, at the end of January. They also raise questions about how the patient was infected. Virologists who studied the
main strains of the virus circulating in France last month concluded that they probably didn’t come directly from China or Italy, and had been spreading undocumented for some time.
