Circulation of the virus: why the west of the country is relatively spared?

There are several reasons why the virus circulates strongly in the East than in the West. The first is linked to one of the modes of spread of the virus. Droplets exhaled by a person remain suspended in the air. When it’s hot, they evaporate and when it’s cold, they fall to the ground. “The most favorable conditions are relatively cold temperatures between 2 and 9 °. These conditions can vary during the course of the day”, explains Alix Roumagnac, CEO of the hydrometeorological monitoring site Predict Services.

The ideal temperatures for the virus are more in the east than in the west. It is precisely in these most affected areas that the government is accelerating vaccination. The Moselle has been provided with 30,000 doses of vaccines. Professor Khalifé Khalifé, cardiologist, first deputy mayor of Metz, “hopes to have others to meet the demand”.

On the map of the most contaminated departments, we can clearly see a red zone further east and a yellow zone further west. A temperate coastal strip which benefits from a second favorable factor. Unlike the South-East of the country, the urban density is less there. “Large cities like Bordeaux are so-called rather flat cities where the population is dispersed and not in large, very concentrated building bars”, underlines Benoît Elleboode, director of the ARS of Nouvelle-Aquitaine.

France also whose geographical position in the far west of Europe exposes it less to the mixing of the population, even near the Spanish border. “Between France and Spain, there are the Pyrenees. It is not a completely open border like the Grand Est. There is no major exchange of populations, apart from the summer”, continues- he. The regions most spared by the virus are in the West: Brittany, New Aquitaine and Pays de la Loire. Or those which are isolated like Corsica.