En prey to an outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic fueled by the British variant, the urban community of Dunkirk now knows what sauce it will be eaten with. Visiting the northern town, this Wednesday, February 24, to wedge new restrictions with local elected officials, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, announced weekend confinement for the city and its agglomeration, effective from this Friday night.
In this agglomeration of 250,000 inhabitants, of whom “one in a hundred falls ill every week”, weekend trips will only be possible for certain reasons, and the ten largest shopping centers will no longer function by “click-and-go”. , specified the minister.
Non-food businesses closed
“Like what was decided and implemented in the Alpes-Maritimes department last weekend”, businesses other than food will also remain closed, added Olivier Véran. These measures, decided after consultation with the local elected officials who approved them, are justified by the epidemic situation “very worrying, alarming even” in Dunkirk, where the incidence rate of the disease is “double what it was. at the height of the first and second waves ”, explained the Minister. The agglomeration has indeed a record incidence rate of 900 cases per 100,000 inhabitants on Monday over the last seven days, more than four times higher than the national average (205) and worse than in the Nice metropolis.
READ ALSOCovid: 17% of people over 20 have been infected in France
Local hospitals are saturated, to the point that it is necessary “to transfer patients from now on to other hospitals in the region, and tomorrow, it is probable”, elsewhere in France, he added. The mayor (DVG) of Dunkirk, Patrice Vergriete, said he “understood” the government’s decision. “We wanted to give prevention a chance, but the general situation is more difficult, the population must understand it,” he explained. “The hospital is saturated, the nursing staff exhausted. Now I am waiting for the Dunkirk residents to respect the decisions, ”he added.“Give the city one last chance” to escape confinement
For the Dunkirk resident Didier Château, 76, the time has come to “take the bull by the horns! », Especially since, as in the rest of France, the mild weather brings walkers into the streets. But the elected officials of the urban community, who met on Tuesday, preferred to “give the city one last chance” to escape confinement, at the cost of a kind of voluntary self-containment. While stressing that he would not oppose a putting under a bell, the mayor DVG, Patrice Vergriete, had advocated a burst of civic-mindedness of his citizens, called to respect the rule of “zero gathering” until mid- March, family and friendly reunions included.
READ ALSOCovid-19: Nice under tension
Proposals to which Eric Glucksmann, president of the Dunkirk city center merchants association, who hoped to avoid the “new disaster” of imposed confinement, adhered. In any case, the exceptional screening campaign launched last Thursday in particular at the Kursaal, the city’s convention center, where a thousand people came to be tested, making it possible to count 83 positive cases, will be extended until Friday, the ARS said.
Vaccine boost
A boost in vaccines is also expected, after 2,400 additional doses last week. The local elected officials had alerted the government on February 12 on the rise of the wave, carried in this city located in front of England and not far from the Belgian border, by the English variant, which represents more than 70% of the contaminations .
READ ALSOCovid: “The effect of the vaccine will counteract the possible negative effects of deconfinement”
But the executive then declined their request for an early closure of one week of colleges and high schools, before the holidays, sparking criticism from the mayor. He now welcomes the dialogue with the government. “The logic is to take a local approach, to do it case by case, in consultation, because the situations are different within the regions”, explained Tuesday to Agence France-Presse the entourage of Emmanuel Macron, on the sidelines a visit by the Head of State to Côte d’Or. “We always arrive a little too late. The rise in cases has already gone back several weeks, ”regretted BFM TV Yves Buisson, epidemiologist, president of the Covid-19 group at the National Academy of Medicine.
The measures must be “adapted to the fastest form of the virus, and therefore, in this case, to the British variant”, pointed out Jean-Stéphane Dhersin, deputy scientific director of Insmi at the CNRS, on the same antenna. The situation is also monitored in the rest of the department and the bordering Pas-de-Calais, where the signals have turned red with an incidence rate of 340 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
A stable number of hospitalized patients at a high level,
Vigilance also in Île-de-France, where the same rate has increased to 277 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The Prime Minister paid a surprise visit Tuesday evening to the Argenteuil hospital center (Val-d’Oise). “My obsession is to keep people from coming to your home. There is the hard method, containment, etc. But the best way is to get vaccinated, ”pleaded Jean Castex. While supplies remain limited, the vaccine campaign has affected more than 2.6 million people (for at least one dose) and vaccination among general practitioners and companies is due to start Thursday with AstraZeneca.
READ ALSOCoignard – Provisional (and encouraging) lessons from the epidemic
However, France is not at this stage undergoing the dreaded explosion for several weeks because of the variants. Over the last seven days, Public Health France has recorded about 140,000 new cases, against just under 130,000 the previous seven days, with the number of hospitalized patients stable at a high level, at more than 25,000 patients. The rate of hospital deaths appears to be slowing, to 314 on Tuesday, from 352 and 439 the two previous Tuesdays. In total, more than 85,000 people have died since the outbreak began a year ago.
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