France has discovered a patient who had the coronavirus as far back as December 2019, suggesting that the virus has been spreading for longer than previously believed.
A patient admitted to the hospital in late December with flu-like symptoms turns out to have had COVID-19, according to an article in Bloomberg.
Official data show that the first COVID-19 cases appeared in France among people who had returned from Wuhan, China, in late January.
The patient, a 42-year-old fishmonger, checked into a hospital near Paris on Dec. 27 and was released two days later.
Doctors discovered that he was infected with the virus when they retroactively tested respiratory samples from patients with flu-like symptoms who had not tested positive for the flu.
The question now is how the patient was infected. Previous research suggested that the coronavirus did not come to France via China or Italy and may have been spreading among the populace much earlier than previously assumed.
This is not the first instance of new findings on the earliest cases of coronavirus infection. In late April, an autopsy in Santa Clara, California, of a person who died on Feb. 6 revealed the presence of the virus. Previously, the first known death in the United States from COVID-19 occurred on Feb. 26.
