Weeks before Chinese authorities acknowledged that the coronavirus could be transmitted by humans, and nearly a month before the first officially recorded cases in Europe, a 42-year-old fishmonger showed up at a hospital in suburban Paris coughing, feverish and having trouble breathing. It was December 27th, reports The New York Times.
Now doctors in France say that the December patient may have been the earliest known coronavirus case in Europe.
If confirmed, the case of the fishmonger, Amirouche Hammar, would mean the deadly virus made an appearance on the continent long before officials there began tackling it. Such a discovery would bring a strange new wrinkle to the story of the virus in Europe, one that has the potential of blowing up the previously established chronology.
The French government says it is looking at the report. The doctors who made the finding said that they are confident in it, and that they tested the patient’s old sample twice to avoid false positives. But they acknowledged that they could not completely rule out that possibility.
The doctors also cautioned that without further analysis of the sample, it was unclear whether the man had passed the virus on to anyone else, or whether his case was tied in any way to the epidemic that arrived later.
But if the timeline of when the virus appeared in Europe does change, the official efforts to combat the contagion will turn out to have been not just too late, but hopelessly too late.
By the time the first serious measures were put in place — the French government didn’t order a lockdown until March 16th — the virus may have already appeared three months earlier, according to a study of the new case that has been peer-reviewed and accepted for formal publication in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
That, in turn, would help explain the rapidly developing catastrophe that has since unfurled in France and Europe. There have been thousands of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, in numbers that only in recent weeks have begun to abate somewhat, as a result of the French government’s rigid confinement measures.
France alone has recorded over 25,000 coronavirus deaths.
“If confirmed, what this case does highlight is the speed at which an infection starting in a seemingly remote part of the world, can quickly seed infections elsewhere,” said Prof. Rowland Kao, the Sir Timothy O’Shea Professor of Veterinary Epidemiology and Data Science at the University of Edinburgh, in an interview for Britain’s Science Media Centre.
“Why is this important?” he added. “It means that the lead time we have for assessment and decision-making can be very short.”
The journal publishing the report about the case has had a brush with controversy over the coronavirus, walking back a study it published about treatments for the virus. And much about this apparent first case remains a mystery.
But the authors of the paper, doctors at the Avicenne Hospital in the Paris suburb of Bobigny, among others, declare flatly: Their study is of a “patient infected with Covid-19 one month before the first reported cases in our country” whose “lack of recent travel suggests that the disease was already spreading among the French population at the end of December 2019.”
French authorities declared the first official cases of coronavirus in the country — three people who had all recently been in China — on January 24th. That was four days after China for the first time confirmed human-to-human transmission.
The doctors retested a sample from a patient who had suffered from pneumonia. They found the coronavirus.
“There’s no doubt for us,” said Dr. Yves Cohen, head of intensive care at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals, in the northern suburbs of Paris, and one of the authors of the study, in a telephone interview Tuesday. “It was already there in December.”