French doctors say they found a Covid-19 patient from December

No surprise, given the nature of infectious diseases, and the fact that this is a new virus in humans, and people were not looking for it at first. It would have been surprising if it were not circulating before it was first diagnosed.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/health/france-coronavirus-december-death-intl/index.html

By Maggie Fox, CNN
Updated 8:35 PM ET, Mon May 4, 2020


There's new evidence that the coronavirus may have been in France weeks earlier than was previously thought.

Doctors at a Paris hospital say they've found evidence that one patient admitted in December was infected with Covid-19. If verified, this finding would show that the virus was already circulating in Europe at that time -- well before the first known cases were diagnosed in France or hotspot Italy.

"Covid-19 was already spreading in France in late December 2019, a month before the official first cases in the country," the team at Groupe Hospitalier Paris Seine in Saint-Denis wrote in a study published Sunday in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.

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Researchers in the US have also started finding evidence that the virus was infecting and killing people earlier than the country's first reported cases.

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"One sample was positive taken from a 42 year old man born in Algeria, who lived in France for many years, and worked as a fishmonger," the team wrote. "His last trip was in Algeria during August 2019."
The man had not been to China, and one of his children had also been sick, the team reported.

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