When his phone rang ten days ago, Amirouche Hammar, 53, did not expect to hear this news. It is Pr Yves Cohen, the head of the resuscitation service at the Avicenne, Bobigny, and Jean-Verdier, Bondy (Seine-Saint-Denis) hospitals, who inform him that he is now the new "zero patient" suspected of the Covid-19 epidemic in France.
"He announced to me that after double checking, I was very positive at Covid-19 during my time in his service, at Jean-Verdier", at the end of December, tells us on the phone this resident of Bobigny, still blown away. “It shocked me because I have diabetes. We can't help but think of all the victims who died. But, somewhere, I was relieved to be finally fixed ”.
"The doctors were in the dark"
It was around December 20 that this fishmonger, father of four, felt the first symptoms. "It started with a dry cough," he recalls. After four or five days, he had a high fever, "exceeding 40 ° C". "I first thought it was the seasonal flu." But the temperature does not drop. Amirouche begins to feel more and more severe chest pain. The evening of December 26, he spits blood. "I went to the emergency room the next morning." Amirouche is admitted to the intensive care unit, where he is placed on oxygen.
"My wife was panicked to see me like that, with sons everywhere." Amirouche admits to having felt, at that time, "near the end". “It hit hard, like stabbing in the chest. The doctors told me it was a severe lung infection. But they admitted to being in the dark ”. The Balbynian will take between six and ten days to recover.
Contaminated by his wife?
Today, he wonders. How could this father who has not traveled recently and who has no connection with China, been infected? And so early? "Just before my illness, my wife had a dry cough, with a little fever, for three days," he recounts.
His wife, a fish vendor in supermarkets, rubs shoulders with many people on a daily basis. “It has a lot of foreign customers, who come to buy fresh fish before taking the plane to Roissy. Not to mention that it is installed next to a sushi section, where Asians work ”. Two of the couple's four children were also infected. "Fortunately, it didn't last long, but we still had to take them to pediatric emergencies for verification."
Retrospective analyzes of the tests
Without the intuition of Professor Yves Cohen and his colleague, Dr. Jean-Ralph Zahar, internist, Amirouche Hammar would never have known that he had been infected with SARS-CoV-2.
The two specialists decided to reopen the files of 14 patients, hospitalized in intensive care in their hospitals for pneumonia, in December and January. At the time, tests had been carried out to check whether they were carrying the flu or a possible coronavirus (but not SARS-Cov-2, then unknown).
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Although the tests had all been negative, the doctors had frozen the samples, taken with swabs. It was by re-analyzing these samples, weeks later, with a test for Covid-19, that they discovered that Amirouche Hammar was very positive on December 27. One month before the first three cases of contamination detected on French soil.
