The story dates from March 25, but it is just beginning to speak. It starts from a statement by Elodie Clouvel to the television channel Loire 7, unearthed by the Parisian on Wednesday. The modern pentathlon world champion says that many athletes present in Wuhan - the future cradle of the pandemic - at the end of October for the World Military Games had fallen ill when they returned.
"I think that with Valentin we already had the coronavirus, well the Covid-19, because we were in Wuhan for the World Military Games at the end of October. And in fact, it turns out that after the Military World Games we all got sick with the same symptoms. Valentin missed three days of training. I was sick too. I had a big conjunctivitis (...) it was too weird ... I had things that I had not had before, she said. We weren't more worried than that because we weren't talking about it yet but it's true that we were coming back from Wuhan and that's when the virus developed and we started talking about it. "
A cut version?
According to AFP, there are two versions of this interview online, including one where the part in question was cut. Contacted by this same media, the army denies. She claims to have received no reports of illnesses akin to Covid-19 from these athletes.
“There have not been any cases within the French delegation of the World Military Games, declared to the Health Service of the influenza armies or hospitalization during and upon return of the JMME, which may be related, a posteriori , to cases of Covid-19 ", reacted the ministry for the Armies, which does not specify if the young woman was or not in contact with military doctors to be tested or to compare its symptoms of the time with those of the new coronavirus.
"No other country has reported such cases"
"The French delegation benefited from medical follow-up, before and during the games, with a dedicated medical team made up of nearly twenty staff," said the ministry again, recalling that "when the World Military Games summer (JMME) took place from October 18 to 27, 2019, in Wuhan in China, the epidemic linked to Covid-19 was then not known "and that" the first case of Covid-19 was not reported by China to the WHO, only on December 31, 2019 ".
“There are a lot of athletes from the World Military Games in particular who have been very sick. We had contact with the military doctor recently who told us "I think you got it because there are a lot of people who were sick from this delegation", "said the athlete in the interview. "To date and to our knowledge, no other country represented at the JMME in Wuhan has also reported such cases," said the ministry.
- China
- Coronavirus
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