Europe had a confirmed Covid-19 case in December 2019
the verdict
REFUTED
the evidence says no
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Reference literature and clinical case records establish that the first confirmed COVID-19 case in Europe was diagnosed on January 24, 2020, rather than in December 2019.
COVID-19 pandemic in Europe
The global COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Europe with its first confirmed case in Bordeaux, France, on 24 January 2020. After that, the virus quickly spread across the continent. By 17 March 2020, every country in Europe had confirmed cases of COVID-19,[5] and all of them reported at least one death, with the exception of Vatican City. Italy was the first European country to experience a major outbreak in early 2020, becoming the first country worldwide to introduce a a national lockdown.[6] By 13 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Europe the epicentre of the pandemic[7][8] and it remained so until the WHO announced it was overtaken by South America on 22 May.[9] By 18 March 2020, lockdowns introduced in Europe affected more than 250 million people.[10] Despite the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, Europe became the pandemic's epicentre once again in late 2021.[11] On 11 January 2022, as the Omicron variant was rapidly exploding worldwide, Dr.
anuary 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
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PMCID: PMC7156120 PMID: 32224310
This article has been corrected. See Lancet Infect Dis. 2020 May 19;20(7):e148 .
This article has been corrected. See Lancet Infect Dis. 2020 May 27;20(6):e116 .
See " Understanding COVID-19: what does viral RNA load really mean? " on page 635.
Abstract
Background
On Dec 31, 2019, China reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in people at Wuhan, Hubei Province. The responsible pathogen is a novel coronavirus, named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). We report the relevant features of the first cases in Europe of confirmed infection, named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), with the first patient diagnosed with the disease on Jan 24, 2020. Methods
In this case series, we followed five patients admitted to Bichat-Claude Bernard University Hospital (Paris, France) and Pellegrin University Hospital (Bordeaux, France) and diagnosed with COVID-19 by semi-quantitative RT-PCR on nasopharyngeal swabs. We assessed patterns of clinical disease and viral load from different samples (nasopharyngeal and blood, urine, and stool samples), which were obtained once daily for 3 days from hospital admission, and once every 2 or 3 days until patient d
Everything we examined (2)
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