French doctors have analyzed old negative PCR tests and claim that the first patient with Covid-19 does not date back to January 2020 but to last December. Others estimate that the first cases date from November. In any case, some experts think that there was a problem within the French health system network since the alert was not given early enough.
At the end of April 2020, researchers from the Institut Pasteur indicated that Covid-19 was circulating freely from mid-January. And yet, the first official case on the territory French is an 80-year-old man from the province of Hubei (China) who arrived in Paris on January 23, 2020. But in an article published by Euronews on June 1, 2020, we learn that the first patient affected by the coronavirus in France dates from December 2019.
Head of the intensive care unit at Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny, Professor Yves Cohen is behind this assertion. The person concerned explained that he resumed with his team all the tests carried out between December 16 and January 16 on patients with pneumonia declared negative for Covid-19. However, the team found one positive PCR test out of a total of 14 tests.
It is about a patient admitted to this hospital on December 27, 2019. In other words, the latter is currently the oldest biologically confirmed case in France and therefore in Europe. This means that the first case treated in a French hospital precedes the alert issued by China to the World Health Organization (WHO) by about a month. This is therefore the ultimate proof that this alert was far too late.
Pr Yves Cohen recalls that the first cases officially appeared in France at the end of January and that the crisis began between the end of February and the beginning of March. For the doctor, the coronavirus has probably been spreading since December. The interested party indicates that this discovery makes it possible to understand that the speed of dissemination is actually longer by about a month . In other words, in the event of a new pandemic, the first cases should very quickly alert the government and the latter could then be much more reactive.
While there is a good chance that Covid-19 was already circulating in December 2019, it could be that patient zero is even earlier. In an article from May 17, 2020, Le Parisien reported the work of doctors at the Albert-Schweitzer hospital in Colmar (Haut-Rhin). They have indeed brought out several thousand medical images in order to find evidence of a trace of Covid-19 before the epidemic. However, some scanners dating from November 2019 have abnormalities typical of Covid-19. This is not far-fetched insofar as the Haut-Rhin department then became one of the epicenters of the epidemic in France.
For Laurent Gerbaud, head of the public health department at the CHU de Clermont-Ferrand, there has been a concern within the French health system. Indeed, the latter was not able to give the alert earlier. The expert believes that France should have a population alert system in conjunction with intensive care units. This could make it possible to react more quickly and to put in place measures in the event of a health emergency.
