Inserm identified at least 13 cases of Covid-19 infection in France between November 2019 and January 2020.
- Of the 13 cases, 11 were further investigated revealing that 6 people had no symptoms and 5 showed signs of viral respiratory illnesses.
- These results suggest that from the months of November and December, the rate of contamination in the French population is already around one case per thousand.
- The researchers will conduct further research to find out if the virus was already present in September or even August.
He has just lost his title of “national patient zero”: Amirouche Hammar, the first French case identified by a PCR test on December 27, 2019, is not the first official case of Covid-19 infection on our territory. From the retrospective analysis of samples from 9,144 adults collected from the 200,000 participants in the Constances cohort (a large epidemiological study on the coronavirus, editor’s note), Inserm researchers have identified positive tests for anti-antibody antibodies. -Older SARS-CoV-2 in at least 13 cases. These samples were taken between November 5, 2019 and January 30, 2020. Results that cast great doubt on the official version of the start of the pandemic from the market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.
1 case per 1,000 in France from November and December
What is the origin of the pandemic which has killed more than 2 million people and which has paralyzed the world for almost a year? A team of scientists from the World Health Organization (WHO) dispatched to China last January announced that there was no indication that there was transmission of the virus in Wuhan before December 2019. A conclusion which raises questions for the view of the results of the study conducted by Inserm researchers and published on February 6 in theEuropean Journal of Epidemiology. This suggests an early circulation of the virus in Europe, from November 2019.
Of the 13 samples suggestive of Covid-19 infection between November 2019 and January 2020, eleven cases were further investigated, six of which reported no symptoms in the weeks prior to sample collection. ‘sample. “Five participants, on the other hand, showed signs of viral respiratory illnesses, and eight were in close contact with people who showed such signs or reported risk situations of potential exposure to Sars-CoV-2.”, specifies Inserm in a press release published on February 10.
The majority of cases were returning from travel
“These results suggest that from the months of November and December, the contamination rate in the French population is already around one case per thousand.concluded Professor Fabrice Carrat, director of the Pierre-Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health (Inserm, Sorbonne University) who conducted the study, quoted by The world. These results do not show an over-representation of the disease in certain regions. We seem to find cases sporadically, all over the territory.”
More than half of these cases are people who have traveled or been in contact with sick people. “One of the cases had traveled for two months in Asia and returned to France in early December… Another is a doctor, which is also a risk factor”, reveals Fabrice Carrat. A woman in her 30s who tested positive in November explained that her partner suffered from a severe cough in October. Another, having traveled to Spain in early November, had been in contact with a family member who suffered from pneumonia of unknown origin between October and December.
More research to study if the virus was circulating in September, or even August
The Constances cohort, from which the samples are taken, contains blood data collected routinely since 2018 on more than 200,000 people, leading researchers to try to go back even further in time. “The question we are now asking ourselves is whether the virus was already in France in September and why not in Augustadvances the epidemiologist Marie Zins, principal investigator of the cohort. We are seeking funding to carry out the necessary analyses.”
The world concludes by affirming that this discovery does not call into question the fact that the “classic” strain of the virus, that is to say before the appearance of the variants, which circulates in the world appeared at the end of 2019 in the Chinese province of Hubei where the city of Wuhan is located…