Covid-19: has the peak of the fifth wave finally been reached?

Will the sunny days make their return to France? Since December and the arrival of the highly contagious Omicron variant, new infections have jumped to unprecedented levels. Regularly, France has recorded more than 300,000 positive tests in 24 hours. But in recent days, optimism seems to be back: the number of patients admitted to critical care is no longer increasing, and contaminations are marking time.

Sunday January 16, for the first time in several weeks, the new cases diagnosed were even fewer than those recorded the previous Sunday. In total, 294,452 contaminations are recorded every day in the country, on average, against more than 310,000 a week earlier. At the dawn of the entry into force of the vaccine pass, has France reached the peak of the fifth wave?

For Professor Arnaud Fontanet, member of the Scientific Council, the signals are green. “The worst-case scenario is moving away, the decline has begun“, he noted this Monday morning at the microphone of France Inter. “We had elements on our projections to say that by reducing our contacts by 20%, we halved the number of hospitalizations, that’s probably what happened.”

In terms of contamination, however, the curve remains different. Nationally, the number of cases is still increasing, but much less rapidly than in recent weeks. According to data from Public Health France, compiled by CovidTracker, the incidence rate is 2,923 cases per 100,000 inhabitants on January 13, against 2,473 a week earlier. But in recent days, it tends to stabilize.

“France has not yet reached the epidemic peak”, tempers with LCI Professor Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health in Geneva (Switzerland). He estimates that the reproduction rate of the virus (the number of people infected on average by a patient) is set at 1.18 in France. As a reminder, it must be less than 1 for the epidemic to follow a downward trend. However, optimism is in order. “The peak is reached in two regions: Île-de-France and Corsica”, continues Professor Flahault. And in all the other mainland territories, the increase in the number of cases seems to be gradually declining.

For epidemiologist Jonathan Roux, we still have to wait before declaring victory. “What we are seeing at the moment may be an effect of a heavy use of self-tests”, he says on LCI (see video at the top of this article). “After a self-test, you are not obliged to carry out a PCR or antigen test, even if it is strongly recommended.” This could explain, according to him, the end of the increase in recorded contaminations and the beginning of the peak. “Let’s wait a little longer before confirming that we have reached the peak.”