Until now, France was believed to have recorded Europe’s first case on Jan. 24, in Bordeaux. On Tuesday, Paris streets remained deserted as a man rode a bike.
Photo: gonzalo fuentes/ReutersPARIS—French doctors have discovered a case of the new coronavirus dating from late December in a man who was hospitalized near Paris, the earliest publicly identified Covid-19 infection outside China.
The case, in a man with no history of travel to China, changes the timeline of the pandemic, suggesting that the virus was spreading in Europe at least weeks earlier than previously believed and more than a month before Italy’s outbreak. The finding is a crucial step in a global medical investigation that is scrutinizing how the virus originated in China and then spread to the West, infecting more than 3.6 million people and killing at least 252,000.
Doctors in Europe and the U.S. are beginning to comb through medical records looking for previously undetected coronavirus cases. Those efforts could help public-health authorities understand whether the virus spreads quickly after an initial infection, or takes time to reach a magnitude that would result in significant numbers of deaths.
The French case indicates that the virus could have been circulating months before it infected enough people to start flooding French emergency rooms with patients, said Yves Cohen, a French doctor who helped lead the study.
“The important thing for us is to understand how the virus lives, how it propagates, to fight it better,” Dr. Cohen said. “The virus took more time to generate the epidemic than we thought previously.”
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In the U.S., doctors are examining deaths in the months leading up to the epidemic to see whether people were dying of undetected coronavirus cases. One such effort found the first known coronavirus death on Feb. 6 of a 57-year-old California woman. That death came nearly three weeks before one that authorities previously considered the first in the U.S. caused by the coronavirus.
Dr. Cohen and other doctors at two hospitals northeast of Paris examined samples of patients who had been hospitalized with flulike symptoms in December and January. After setting aside samples of patients who tested positive for other pathogens or who had symptoms inconsistent with Covid-19, the doctors were left with 14 samples to be tested for the new coronavirus. One patient at Jean-Verdier Hospital, in the working-class Paris suburb of Bondy, tested positive.
The man, Amirouche Hammar, went to the emergency room on Dec. 27, after suffering from cough, fever and headache over the previous four days. Mr. Hammar, 43, was coughing up blood the night before.
“I had more and more trouble breathing,” Mr. Hammar said. “It was very painful.”
He was admitted to the hospital’s intensive-care unit and then released after three days when his condition improved. Two of the man’s children, aged 10 and 4, fell ill days after Mr. Hammar. They too were taken to the emergency room and then recovered.
Mr. Hammar and Dr. Cohen said he likely contracted the virus from his wife, who fell mildly ill around Dec. 20. She works at a fish stand at a large Carrefour supermarket northeast of Paris. Mr. Hammar said the fish stand attracts an international clientele because of its proximity to Charles de Gaulle airport.
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She also works right next to a sushi stand staffed by people of Chinese origin who could have been the source of her infection, Dr. Cohen said.
The World Health Organization said Mr. Hammar’s case is the first publicly reported infection outside China before January of which the agency is aware. The virus first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in early December when Chinese medical authorities began treating cases of a mysterious viral pneumonia. At the time, dozens of flights a week moved travelers between Paris and cities in China, including several direct flights from Wuhan. Those flights continued largely as scheduled throughout December.
“It is possible that some infected people traveled from Wuhan to other countries at that time,” the WHO said.
Air France canceled its direct Wuhan-Paris flights on Jan. 22 and then all service to China Jan. 30.
Other cases directly linked to travel with China started to appear in Europe about this time. On Jan. 24, France recorded Europe’s first case at the time, a businessman who traveled to Wuhan and was then hospitalized in Bordeaux. A German company also reported an outbreak connected to one of its Chinese employees, who reported testing positive on Jan. 26 after visiting the company’s headquarters in Bavaria. Italy confirmed its first cases on Jan. 31, in two Chinese tourists from Wuhan. That was weeks before authorities discovered the virus spreading rapidly in northern Italy among people who hadn’t traveled recently to China.
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Write to Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com
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