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CORONAVIRUS – “We are coming out of this fifth wave, which has been a little longer than expected.” Guest of the morning of Franceinfo this Friday, May 6, the president of the Scientific Council Jean-François Delfraissy mentioned the possible lifting of the last health restrictions against Covid-19, while warning that the epidemic was not over.
“At the end of May, beginning of June, there will probably be political decisions”, argued Jean-François Delfraissy, while, according to the latest figures published Thursday by Public Health France, the number of contaminations and people hospitalized due to Covid- 19 continues to decline.
Last week, “the slowdown in the epidemic was confirmed throughout the territory, with a decrease in incidence rates (-39%) and positivity (-5 points)”, summarizes the health agency. in his weekly update.
This summer, the end of the mask in transport?
Faced with this ebb of the virus, the Head of State Emmanuel Macron stressed on Wednesday that the health situation in “very marked improvement, will give rise to adaptations in the coming weeks” of the measures in force. Since mid-March, most restrictions have been lifted on the territory, but some measures are still in force, such as wearing a mask in public transport, the health pass required in health establishments, or even compulsory isolation. after testing positive for Covid-19.
“We are coming out of this fifth wave, which has been a little longer than expected”, confirmed Jean-François Delfraissy this Friday. Forecasting by the end of May a drop in contamination of around 5 to 10,000 cases per day, the professor of medicine, a specialist in immunology, believes that there are reasons to be “reasonably optimistic for France and Europe. ‘Europe for the coming months, with probably a spring that is likely to go well”.
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However, he recalled franceinfo that the situation was the same a year ago, before the Delta variant arrived in France in June, which reshuffled the cards. “The epidemic is under control, but we all know it is not over,” warned Jean-François Delfraissy. We can indeed expect “the appearance of a new variant: we estimate it rather at the start of the school year, but perhaps it will arrive before.”
And the whole question will then be to know what will be its contagiousness, its severity and its resistance to vaccines. Two sub-variants of Omicron (BA.4 and BA.5) currently seem to be at the origin of a new epidemic peak in South Africa, which is entering the winter period.
The scientist believes that the World Health Organization (WHO) “is right” to insist on the need to continue to sequence the variants. “By definition, new variants to gain power over the current variant must be more transmissible,” he argued.
Impossible to say when the pandemic will end
It is currently too early to know precisely the virulence of the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, but according to initial data, the vaccines continue to offer good protection against the severe forms of Covid and reduce the risk of death.
For its part, China, which does not benefit from sufficient vaccination coverage, is still under epidemic pressure from the BA.1 and BA.2 variants of Omicron. Faced with the multiplication of contaminations, the country maintains its zero Covid policy, which involves massive and repeated confinements and screenings of the population, despite the growing discontent of the population. Unlike European countries, including France, which have abandoned containments and curfews in their management of the pandemic, thanks to the vaccination shield.
In France, “the pandemic is clearly not over, although we can hope that, given the levels of immunity in the population […], we can move on to a more transitional phase”, underlined Thursday Sylvie van der Werf, virologist at the Pasteur Institute during a press briefing from the National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis (ANRS). But it is “very difficult today to give specific indicators” to determine when the pandemic will end, she added.
See also on The HuffPost: Faced with Covid, immunity is not all or nothing
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