The first patient with Covid-19 in France appeared at the end of December, a month before the first case was confirmed, according to an intensive care chief.
The novel coronavirus first appeared in France on 27 December 2019, Yves Cohen, an intensive care chief from Avicenne Hospital in Paris, said in an interview with local media BFMTV on Sunday.
He said his medical team revisited test results of 24 patients with respiratory infections and tested negative for flu and other kinds of coronavirus in December and January, among them a male patient showed positive for Covid-19.
The patient was tested in hospital on 27 December, a month before the first French cases were confirmed, Dr Cohen said, adding that the test had been repeated several times to confirm the result.
The patient was sick for 15 days and infected his two children, but not his wife who works in a fish stall of a supermarket.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Read:
Latest coronavirus stories
Dr Cohen initially questioned whether the wife had been exposed to fish products from China, but later confirmed that she had only been exposed to fish produced in France.
The expert said the man might be "patient zero".
"But perhaps there are other patients in other regions," he said.
"The virus might still be circulating."
Both the man and the children have recovered and are in good health now.
The number of people who have died from a coronavirus in France increased by 330 to 25,531 on Tuesday, the sharpest rate of increase in six days, government data showed.
In a statement, the Health Ministry said the number of people in intensive care units fell to 3,430 from 3,696 on Monday, down for a 27th consecutive day.
The number of people in hospital with the virus also fell again to 25,775 from 25,548 also continuing a now uninterrupted three-week fall.
