SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019

International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents

3 May 2020

 

Highlights

• SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in France in late December 2019, 1 month before the first official cases in the country.
• Early community spreading changes our knowledge of the COVID-19 epidemic.
• This new case changes our understanding of the epidemic, and modelling studies should adjust to these new data.

 

Read full article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920301643

Thanks to Puccini for posting this!
 

6 hours ago, Puccini said:

Read full article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920301643

 

This is in my humble opionion a key information to understand why some countries such as Thailand and Cambodia have such a low number of Covid 19 cases - the virus did spread there, long before anyone was talking about it, knowing about it or testing it.

See also 

 

For the ones not following the link Puccini posted here some quotes from the CBSNews article about this study as posted in the International Journal Of Antimicrobial Agents :
 

Quote

Two French doctors said Tuesday the coronavirus was in Europe a month earlier than originally believed. Acting on a hunch, they decided to take another look at a number of patients who were treated in intensive care for pneumonia in December and January.
 

They ran new tests on old swabs taken from patients in the Paris region. One of them, from a man living in a suburb of the French capital, came back positive for COVID-19. The 43-year-old man was admitted to the hospital on December 27, four weeks before the first three cases in Europe were confirmed.

 

Quote

The man who was treated in December for pneumonia told French broadcaster BFMTV that to his knowledge, he had not been to China and was not in contact with anyone who had been there. The only explanation that he could think of was that his wife, who tested negative, works in a supermarket near Charles de Gaulle Airport, where foreign tourists often shop on arrival in France.

 

Quote

The World Health Organization said that it is "not surprising" that this case has emerged. "It's also possible there are more early cases to be found," WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told a U.N. briefing in Geneva. He encouraged other countries to check records for cases in late 2019, saying this would give the world a "new and clearer picture" of the outbreak.

 

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/french-doctors-find-coronavirus-case-from-month-before-virus-was-believed-to-have-been-in-europe/

So it was all wrong, what we got told: the virus was already on the loose and conquering the world in December 2019, or even earlier, and nobody noticed, because almost all infections are asymptotic.

That is the good news, it was by far not as deadly as later announced by scaremongers, including Neil Ferguson's very flawed Imperial model.

And another good news, that's why there will be no 2nd wave in Thailand, it's through the population already, and they are all still alive. Good news indeed!

 

 

 

Thank you for summarising the scientific paper with quotes from the CBS News website.

16 hours ago, yuyiinthesky said:

So it was all wrong, what we got told: the virus was already on the loose and conquering the world in December 2019

Having one case or a few cases is not 'conquering the world'. Antibody tests are suggesting that cases are more more widespread than previously thought but still fairly low.

 

I would love all this to be true (because it means that we can get back to normal really soon) but I don't possibly see how it fits with the available data about deaths. If the world had this in January and February why is there is a huge spike of deaths in March in so many countries in the world?

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html

 

Seems much more likely that the few early cases just didn't lead to significant community transmission.

3 hours ago, chessman said:

I would love all this to be true (because it means that we can get back to normal really soon) but I don't possibly see how it fits with the available data about deaths. If the world had this in January and February why is there is a huge spike of deaths in March in so many countries in the world?

There was no early death spike noticed because in the countries around Thailand not many have a combination of the risk factors diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. Whatever deaths there were did not get noticed, there are enough pneumonia deaths to make it look normal. 

Northern Italy, New York, UK, there was a lot of panic, a lot of misdeclaration of deaths (e.g. saying "from Corona" instead of "with Corona"), a lot of infection of sick people when they came to the hospitals, in the hospitals, and most of all, a very much higher percentage of older people with the risk factors diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.

You have to get away from the assumption that in and around Thailand the same death rate should have happened as it was claimed for Italy and UK at the beginning, and then it fits perfectly.

14 minutes ago, yuyiinthesky said:

There was no early death spike noticed because in the countries around Thailand not many have a combination of the risk factors diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. Whatever deaths there were did not get noticed, there are enough pneumonia deaths to make it look normal. 

Northern Italy, New York, UK, there was a lot of panic, a lot of misdeclaration of deaths (e.g. saying "from Corona" instead of "with Corona"), a lot of infection of sick people when they came to the hospitals, in the hospitals, and most of all, a very much higher percentage of older people with the risk factors diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.

You have to get away from the assumption that in and around Thailand the same death rate should have happened as it was claimed for Italy and UK at the beginning, and then it fits perfectly.

You're making a lot of assumptions based on one (and only one) case they found in France.

 

If I understand you correctly, you're explaining excess deaths on people visiting hospitals and then dying because they visited those hospitals. That's pretty far out, isn't it more likely that there were a few outlier early cases but significant community transmission didn't happen until later?