
French Covid-19 infections were not caused by patients from China or Italy [pdf] - JPLeRouzic
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.059576v1.full.pdf
======
rpiguy
This is a ridiculous paper and a ridiculous headline.

Firstly, the paper directly states the opposite of the title of this post:

"The first European cases sampled on January 24, 2020 (IDF0372 and IDF0373
from Île-de-France, described in (Lescure, Bouadma et al. 2020) were direct
imports from Hubei, China, and the genomes fall accordingly near the base of
the tree, within clade V, according to GISAID nomenclature (Figure 2, Figure
3A)"

The rest of the paper is supposition that COVID strains evolved simultaneously
(not sequentially from the first infections imported from Wuhan) based on
genetic sequencing, implying that COVID had already been in the French
population before that first diagnosed case from Wuhan.

Since the Chinese government has yet be transparent about when the virus
started spreading in China, and destroyed all early samples of the virus, we
have no real clue as to what the evolutionary history of this virus is.

~~~
JPLeRouzic
A few lines afterward: "Subsequent early cases in the West or East of France
(B2334/B2340, clade V and GE1583, clade S), all with recent history of travel
to Italy, add to the genomic diversity of viruses from Northern Italy, but
also do not appear to have seeded local transmission with the current sampling
"

And in the abstract (and from the French press like "Les Echos"[0]) _" In
parallel, our genomic data reveals the later predominant circulation of a
major clade in many French regions, and implies local circulation of the virus
in undocumented infections prior to the wave of COVID-19 cases. "_

[0] [https://www.lesechos.fr/economie-
france/social/coronavirus-e...](https://www.lesechos.fr/economie-
france/social/coronavirus-en-france-lepidemie-ne-serait-pas-venue-directement-
de-chine-ou-ditalie-1199167)

