French claims being given consideration

Thursday 07 May 2020

Concerns covid-19 was affecting patients in France in December are being looked at by Guernsey's Public Health team, but it's not thought the virus was prevalent in the island before the first positive test result was confirmed in March.

Dr Nicola Brink said she has been reading reports based on claims made by a French doctor who has said blood samples taken from a patient towards the end of last year have tested positive for the corona virus.

However, the Director of Public Health for Guernsey said there are reasons which could explain why the sample tested positive including cross contamination within a laboratory.

A French Doctor has claimed that the virus was in France in December, a month before the first confirmed case.

Dr Cohen tested old blood samples for patients with respiratory symptoms and found a positive result.

This is worth investigating - it could be significant.

— Professor Karol Sikora (@ProfKarolSikora) May 4, 2020

Professor Karol Sikora who tweeted a reference to the claims made by Doctor Cohen is an Oncologist with 50 years experience, and he was a director of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme. 

The claims being made in France have been reported by national news agencies across the country, continent and globally with further tests allegedly being carried out on samples taken from other patients who died from flu-like illnesses towards the end of 2019.

The corona virus pandemic was only declared in the first quarter of 2020, after Chinese scientists detected the covid-19 strain at the very end of December. The World Health Organisation was alerted then and other countries started monitoring patients with respiratory illnesses.

Guernsey's Director of Public Health was informed of the potentially fatal virus at the end of December last year, with plans being put in place for the Bailiwick's response to it from early January.

The first patient in Guernsey to test positive for the virus was confirmed in March, with the most up to data statistics at the time of writing showing 252 people have tested positive since then, with 13 deaths and three presumptive deaths. 

Dr Brink says her Public Health team have been looking back further than March to see if the virus could have been here before then though.

"I've also looked at the case in France from December," confirmed Dr Brink, "I can't find the original scientific data on it, there are lots of things on social media and so on, I think there are a number of explanations for that. It could have been an introduction of a case which just burnt out of someone who became unwell and stayed at home, apparently infected the two children but not their wife. So it's possible it was a small cluster that burnt itself out. So that's one possibility.

"The second possibility is that the methodology we use uses a highly sensitive technology in the form of polymerase chain reaction so it'll detect a single copy of the virus and so one has to wonder if that sample was taken and stored appropriately for molecular technology because otherwise it could potentially get contaminated by any subsequent samples so that's a possibility. I'm not casting any aspersions or anything, but that's something else you'd ask.

"What I would be doing is going and trying to do antibody testing on that cluster of cases because I think that would give you some conclusive proof or not, so a cluster that burnt itself out or a laboratory issue, I think further testing is needed to differentiate which one it was."

Pictured: Dr Nicola Brink.

Dr Brink was clear, there is no evidence so far to suggest the covid-19 virus was present in Guernsey during 2019. She is however looking back at local data to see if there were any patterns which might suggest otherwise.

"With regard to Guernsey, we didn't have any unusual respiratory activity over that period of time, so there was nothing that highlighted to us that we were having a funny flu season or we were having unexplained respiratory symptoms so we weren't having any reports of it at that stage but we do do our flu surveillance, our weekly flu surveillance over that period of time so when we saw that report what we're just going to do is go back and superimpose our respiratory activity over previous years just to see if there's any difference so we'll be having a look at that."