In view of the number of new cases, hospitalizations and daily deaths – in free fall – the Covid-19 clearly no longer corresponds to the medically accepted definition of a pandemic: a disease progressing rapidly in very large geographical areas. Despite a still worrying situation in Latin America and India, the epidemic is decelerating. Contrary to computer models, whose forecasts do not seem to have been particularly reliable.
Almost more hospitalization in Europe
In Europe, the most bereaved continent, new hospitalizations are now tiny. ” The most significant marker is the number of cases requiring hospitalization, estimates Yonathan Freund, emergency doctor at Pitié-Salpétrière. For the past month, the reality on the ground has been that there are very few new serious cases in France ”. The majority of departments now have fewer than five intensive care patients. On Monday, only 75 patients were hospitalized, especially in Ile de France, fifty times less than the daily record established at the end of March!
Italy, the country with the highest number of cases, now records a few dozen deaths every day, against almost a thousand at the height of the crisis in late March. The improvement is also notable in Germany (240 cases Thursday, against a 24-hour record of 7,000 at the end of March), Spain (where no death was recorded Monday for the first time since February), the Netherlands and Belgium.
Only the United Kingdom still deplores daily flows of more than a thousand cases and a hundred deaths. Above all, the countries which started their deconfinement as early as possible, mid-April, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Serbia, etc., record a rapid fall in new cases and only one death per day. Across the board, emergency services are draining with the prospect, at the current rate, that the continent will only have a handful of resuscitation patients in July.
Very low flow of new cases
The daily number of deaths and infections also decreases in Russia, albeit at a still high level, as well as in the United States, the country most affected in the world with 1.8 million cases: the flows are there three times lower to the records of mid-April. The number of hospital patients has declined in the past month in most states. And New York, the most affected region, recorded Thursday a lowest since February, both in number of deaths (49) and hospitalizations.
According to public data from the countries concerned, from Worldometer, or from the Johns Hopkins reference university, the virus no longer circulates at all in Oceania, very little in the Far East, with a few dozen cases a day in Japan (where the state of health emergency has been lifted), South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, etc. Flows are also declining in Africa, except in South Africa.
A dozen countries of concern
However, the official number of cases is increasing by more than 2% per day in another ten countries: Gulf monarchies, Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Mexico. The flow of deaths and official cases has doubled or tripled since mid-May in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, as well as in Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Argentina and Chile.
If this dynamic justifies a certain vigilance, the results remain modest in the latter countries, with officially less than 0.1% of the infected population and an insignificant number of victims of Covid-19 compared to deaths recorded in normal times. Above all, in view of the curves of new cases and deaths, Latin America does not seem so much hit by a renewed epidemic as by the late development of the wave which hit it a month after the rest of the world. With the prospect of a plateau at the end of June, according to the Mexican, Chilean or Argentinian authorities.
The risk of a second wave
Some epidemiologists consider it premature to sound the end of the alert, comparing the situation at the end of 2019 where the virus was spreading discreetly in China. Which would not explain, however, why he “would go into his shell” at the moment. Researchers are considering various hypotheses, including the fact that a majority of humanity may in fact be immune to Covid-19 through previous contact with other coronaviruses, including the common cold. ” Lots of people seem immune right now, in view of the low proportion of infected people among young people, relatives of the sick or carers “Notes Yonathan Freund.
Other epidemiologies, evoking a seasonal cycle as for influenza, fear a second wave in October in the northern hemisphere. However, no rebound after a lull has been observed in the southern hemisphere, where winter is coming in two weeks, including in countries with a temperate climate like New Zealand: only one case has been recorded there for a month!
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