How to properly self-confine to have the most secure Christmas possible? – Pixabay
- This Tuesday, Jean Castex authorized parents not to take their children to school this Thursday and Friday.
- The goal is to reduce interactions as much as possible to a few days before Christmas in order to make family meals as safe as possible.
- 20 Minutes explains how to successfully complete your self-containment.
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This Tuesday, Jean Castex announced on Europe 1 that parents could not send their children to school this Thursday and Friday, two days before the end of the year school holidays. The Prime Minister is following the advice of the Scientific Council, which recommends limiting interactions to one week of Christmas in order to take the least possible risk and to prevent contamination with the coronavirus during family meals.
This practice consists in a way of deciding on your own to confine yourself and stay at home in order to make these holiday season a success. How to achieve good (and effective) self-containment? Little practical guide by 20 Minutes.
What duration?
“As soon as possible,” says epidemiology researcher Michaël Rochoy, who encourages you to self-confine yourself from reading this article if you haven’t already done so. But to go into more detail on the deadlines, three types of duration are possible:
- The average incubation period, four days. This is the time after which we start to be contagious. Before that, it is impossible to know if you have had the virus or not, even by test, the virus is invisible. After four days, a successful test will reveal our viral load and show that we are contaminating, even the first symptoms will start to appear;
- At least one week, the time for the virus to develop and logically pass its peak of contagiousness. This is more or less the timeframe chosen by the authorities. With the children skipping school on Thursday and Friday, and being home from Wednesday noon, that leaves seven days before Christmas;
- The combination of two, four days of incubation followed by seven days to be contaminating, or eleven days. For each restrictive measure put in place (in particular confinement, curfew, etc.), this is roughly the estimated time before seeing the first effects.
If I fully respect the eleven-day self-containment, am I sure I am not contaminating?
Well no, not at all if you live together. Take the example of a family with two parents and one child. The child catches the virus on Monday 14 at school. The time to incubate, we are on the 18th when it begins to be contaminating. Her mother catches her on the 20th during the dinner meal with her daughter. On the 24th, just for Christmas, she entered her peak of contamination, when she went to see grandfather and grandmother. And the scenario can go on for a long time. The father who catches it for example suddenly on the 25th and becomes a contaminant exactly for his New Year’s Eve, etc.
This is why confinement takes more than three weeks before erasing all cases of coronavirus in particular, because of this intrafamily rebound effect. Hence the interest also to self-confine as soon as possible, supports Michaël Rochoy. He attests: “One can be asymptomatic in one person, but not in a thousand people. Understand that the more the number of intrafamilial contaminations increases, the more statistically there is a risk of at least one of these people showing symptoms, which should put the whole family on alert.
Won’t all my efforts be in vain when I take the train to see my family?
It’s a bit of a disaster scenario. You do everything right and you catch the virus at Gare Montparnasse on December 24 to pass it on to your grandparents without wanting to. Except that in reality, this has very little chance of happening. Already because the virus hardly shows itself to be contaminating during the first three days, which should prevent transmission for the Christmas dinner.
Then and above all because Michaël Rochoy assures him, “trains are rarely places of transmission of the virus”, with the wearing of a mask, hypereration and filtration of the air. Only risk, if you eat next to an unknown person, but it is easily avoidable.
What should I not do during self-containment?
Not everyone has the chance or the opportunity to telecommute. However, even face-to-face people can reinforce their caution, with a simple rule: avoid any unmasked person. “A person in face-to-face should be particularly careful to eat alone and avoid any meal, drink or other together,” says Michaël Rochoy. The same goes for children: “We must avoid as much as possible the canteens which are known places of spread of the coronavirus, and give his child a bowl or a sandwich that he can isolate himself to eat. Or not to take her to school, as is now permitted this Thursday and Friday. Obviously, ten days before Christmas, “we will also avoid putting our child back to music, theater, dance, sport, and any non-masked activity”, which a decree authorizes from this Tuesday. .
As the epidemiological researcher points out, collective catering places are today designated as being the most contaminating and at the top of the clusters. With this simple rule, “we avoid the majority of risks”. In fact, even in self-containment, “it is still possible to do your shopping or whatever, now that wearing a mask is compulsory in closed places”, indicates Michaël Rochoy. Who does not see such a big difference between a hypermarket and an outside market: “You just have to be careful that the gauge is respected and that the store is not too full. ”
Does self-containment replace a test?
The epidemiological researcher assures him: “It is absolutely impossible for everyone to be tested for Christmas”, not to mention the famous contamination latency period which can make the virus invisible during a test on the 23rd and make you contaminating the 24 and 25. “On the contrary, everyone can take measures to self-confine as well as possible. “Obviously, nothing prohibits the duplicate self-containment + test if the places are available, but even with all these precautions, a little reminder of the obvious by Michaël Rochoy:” We will have to be very careful at Christmas and the family meal, and adopt as many barrier measures as possible. “
In fineIdeally, these pre-Christmas preventative measures would in fact become the norm even in January and February, rather than being just an excuse for a tactile and contaminating Christmas.
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