PARIS : A patient hospitalized with flu-like symptoms at the end of December in France turned out to have had Covid-19, a finding that suggests the new coronavirus was spreading there at least a month earlier than official records show.
The 42-year-old fishmonger showed up at a hospital near Paris on Dec. 27 with a cough, headache and fever and was treated with antibiotics and discharged after two days.
Doctors found he had Covid-19 by retroactively testing his respiratory samples along with those from a handful of hospitalized patients, describing their work in a case report.
The finding contradicts official statistics, which show the first Covid-19 cases in France occurred in people who returned from Wuhan, China, at the end of January.