Supervised freedom is what France will experience from this Wednesday. The curfew applied throughout the territory since January 16 has been pushed back to 9 pm, before being postponed to 11 pm on June 9 and then disappeared to 30. The Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, on BFM TV has even promised that “soonWe could take off the mask outside.
But this progressive deconfinement is subject to the good evolution of the health situation. The government has set a ridiculously high incidence threshold (more than 400 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over a week) as a condition for continued deconfinement.
With this alder, in fact, all is well, or almost. National incidence dropped to 140 after rising to 411 in March. Two departments remain to be watched, Guyana at 387 and Seine-Saint-Denis at 256.
The dynamics of the epidemic are declining. A drop greater than that anticipated by the Montpellier modeling team, meaning that the French, in May, had less contact than in October.
Resuscitation services still saturated
But, as we know, this crisis depends a lot on the tension of the hospitals, and especially of the intensive care units. Some 4,015 patients still occupy intensive care beds. In Ile-de-France and Hauts-de-France, services remain saturated beyond 100% of their capacity.
France is therefore emerging from confinement with a high occupancy rate of resuscitation beds (we recall that before the crisis, the country had 5,000 beds), as in November. This winter, the number of people in intensive care continued to decline for two weeks before stabilizing for a month and then rising again in mid-January.
The challenge is to avoid the same scenario that would lead to an epidemic outbreak in July. Logically, the gradual reopening in progress should reactivate the circulation of the virus but vaccination will limit this rise. According to Public Health France, as of May 16, there were 9.5 million people “Fully vaccinated”(14.2% of the population), or 670,000 more people than people vaccinated with two doses.
Speed of vaccination campaign
The number of reproduction (marker of the speed of circulation of the virus) fell to 0.8 during this confinement. It should increase again but without this resulting in hospital saturation. Indeed, the well-advanced vaccination of the elderly and frail should reduce the severe forms of Covid-19, as well as the circulation of the virus.
The latest scenarios from the Institut Pasteur give an idea of what could happen. They were anticipating the current dynamic, followed by an upturn. This increase will be more or less strong depending on the speed of the vaccination campaign, the speed of the relaxation of barrier measures and the contagiousness of the variant present in the territory (according to the World Health Organization, the Indian variant could be even more contagious than English). The future will tell how the epidemic will evolve, but, in the meantime, France still deplores around 200 deaths per day from Covid-19.
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