This is suspected of bringing the coronavirus to Europe in December last year.

French scientists say they may have identified a possible case of a person infected with the COVID-19 coronavirus dating back to December, about a month before the first cases were officially confirmed in Europe. The person thought to be the first patient infected with the disease (in Europe) is a French citizen who had no travel history before becoming infected.

In a study published in the international journal Microbial Agents, doctors at a hospital north of Paris reviewed samples taken from 14 patients treated for atypical pneumonia between early December and mid-January. Among them was Amirouche Hammar, a fishmonger in his 40s originally from Algeria who had lived in France for years and had no recent travel history.

Mr. Hammar told the Associated Press news agency that a few weeks ago doctors informed him that it was likely that he had contracted COVID-19 in December.

Now fully recovered and playing football in his garden, Mr Hammar says he feels "blessed" to have survived.

"My wife was shocked (Fatiha). Seeing the pandemic, its deadly wave everywhere in the world, I thought: I am blessed, honestly! The disease was not known at that time. This is the worst thing. The doctors did not know what to do. For them it was a very, very serious infection, that's how they explained it to me, but they were not able to find out what it was," he says.

Mr. Hammar, who has diabetes, was hospitalized with symptoms that doctors say were similar to those seen in COVID-19 patients in China and Italy. Two of his children fell ill a few days after him. When doctors re-examined samples taken from Mr. Hammar in December, they found that he was positive for the coronavirus.

"It started as a dry cough, for about a week. I had a dry cough almost every day. Then the temperature started, which increased every day until it went over 40 degrees Celsius, I'm sure. I didn't measure it, but my wife touched my forehead and said: you're burning like an oven," he says.

Professor Yves Cohen is one of the French researchers and an intensive care specialist in the northern suburbs of Paris, where Mr. Hammar lives, an area that has been particularly hard hit by COVID-19, not only in terms of the number of infected people, but also deaths.

Mr. Cohen dismissed the possibility that the samples taken from Mr. Hammar were infected. He said they had also reviewed his scan, which showed images similar to those of a COVID-19 patient.

"The samples taken from Hammar could be infected and that's why we do several different tests. When we run two tests, if the sample is infected, one of them gives incorrect information, but in this case both were positive. We cannot avoid the fact that we are dealing with COVID-19, since the scanner also showed such a thing and the scanner cannot be infected," he says.

Mr Hammar does not appear to have infected anyone else, according to the data. He later recovered after being treated with antibiotics in intensive care. Mr Cohen and his colleagues say their results suggest there may have been many more unidentified cases of coronavirus before the disease was officially detected in Europe.

"The epidemic probably started a month earlier than we think, and this allows us to know more about the epidemic. That's why I think it's important that other doctors, both in France and in the United States, carry out studies that we are currently conducting to better understand this virus. The better you know the enemy, the more effective the response to it," he says.

Some experts say the results are interesting but hardly conclusive. A spokesperson for the World Health Organization described the findings as “exciting news” and said they could help scientists better understand the evolution of COVID-19.