The first Covid patient in Europe, a sales advisor in the world of wine, hospitalized exactly one year ago in Bordeaux on his return from China, recounted how he
"trembled"
from his isolation room, seeing
"the panic of the world ”,
and wants us to know that it has
“ infected no one ”.
“I haven't infected anyone.
I was the first patient, yes, but I did not infect anyone, ”
said
Laurent Chu, 49-year-old Girondin from Wuhan (China),
in an interview with the
Sud-Ouest
daily
on Friday. for work, and had also seen his family.
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“I kissed my mother, my brother. We shared meals together, they were not worried, moreover neither one nor the other contracted the virus ”,
underlines it.
He presumes,
"after having reflected and discussed with infectious disease specialists on (his) itinerary"
, that he caught the virus at Wuhan station.
"I had taken the train, and the station is next to the famous market where the virus was first detected."
On his return to Gironde, as soon as he felt the fever rising and started to cough, even if it seemed like a
“big cold”,
he
“thought of this virus”
.
And he
"packed his suitcase"
before going to consult.
Everything was disinfected after its passage, the other patients traced and placed in quarantine, but also "
those who were with me on the plane, all those who approached me"
.
Once the Covid was confirmed, Laurent Chu found himself 25 days in an isolation room in intensive care at the Bordeaux University Hospital, surrounded by caregivers dressed in hyper-protections.
“The most difficult, the most unbearable was this imprisonment,”
he recalls
.
All these days, without seeing outside.
The cough, the fever okay, it was hard.
I was watching the news, it made me tremble.
I saw the panic of the world, and I, locked up ”.
"They did not know how to treat me",
remembers the "patient zero" of a virus then still little known.
Paracetamol to bring down fever, but also antibiotics, Remdesivir.
“I knew they were experimenting with treatments, but I was not afraid (...).
I underwent repeated, regular examinations, I was scanned, observed ... But alone ”.
If he says today that he is well, he who had
"never been sick until then"
, he admits not
"to be inside all (his) organs to know the consequences".
But is delighted to
"serve a purpose"
, via an agreement with Inserm for six months of monitoring of its medical data.
“What happened to me, being the first European to be affected by this virus, is beyond my control.
I have neither shame nor pride in it ... I'm not a ski champion! ”He
jokes.
Adding all the same that after having experimented with treatments, he would have liked to
"experiment the vaccine first".
