Sweden's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell says he would not be surprised if Sweden - like France - had isolated cases of coronavirus as far back as November last year. "I think you could find individual cases among travellers to Wuhan who were there back in November and December last year," he told Sweden's TT news agency, when asked about the Paris case. "That doesn't sound strange at all, but more completely to be expected." Yves Cohen, head of intensive care at the Avicenne hospital in Paris, told BFM TV on Sunday that his staff had retested samples taken from patients admitted for pneumonia in December, and that one from December 27 had tested positive for coronavirus - even though the 53-year-old patient had not travelled to China. Previously, Europe’s first case of Covid-19 was confirmed on January 24, almost a month later. Tegnell said he did not believe that the virus had been present in Sweden, or the rest of Europe, to a significant extent before cases began to multiply in February and March. "There wasn't a spread [of infection] outside Wuhan before what we saw more recently in Europe," he said, adding that Sweden's health authorities were not interested in retesting samples from last year. "Right now, this isn't the sort of investigation we want to burden our health system with," he said. "There's a lot of other things to do, and this won't lead to any new actions." According to Sweden's defence forces, none of the 100 Swedish soldiers who were in Wuhan in October last year to take part in the 2019 Military World Games had tested positive for coronavirus.
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