During a trip to Isère, the Minister of Health reported a 20% increase in the number of cases over one week. The number of people hospitalized is falling, but should not reach the objectives set at the beginning of the month.
Some specialists have been warning for several days about a slight resumption of the Covid-19 epidemic. The government too now. During a trip to Isère, the Minister of Health reported this Friday on a “rebound” in France and in the countries around us. “The Covid is no longer falling, it is even increasing”, warned Olivier Véran.
The number of new positive cases rose Thursday evening to 74,818, according to Public Health France, against 60,225 a week ago. That’s a 20% increase. “The epidemic is starting again among young people and the impact on hospital criteria will be felt in a few weeks”, anticipated Wednesday in Release epidemiologist Dominique Costagliola, attributing this recovery to the end of school holidays in several French regions.
For now, “the hospital load continues to drop”, notes Olivier Véran. “But the pace of this decrease has started to slow, so we are extremely vigilant.” The critical care services, where the most seriously affected people are treated, received 1,928 patients on Thursday (including 121 who arrived in the past twenty-four hours), against 1,962 on Wednesday and 2,231 the previous Thursday.
Protect vulnerable people
In February, the Minister of Health had set objectives to be achieved to virtually eliminate the wearing of masks and the vaccination pass. The number of people in intensive care had to fall below the 1,500 mark. Three days before this deadline, this threshold is far from being reached, but Olivier Véran wants to be optimistic: “We will be on Monday in the objectives that we had set ourselves, so there is no difficulty in going to the end of the process of the end of the vaccination pass and the end of the mask, except in transport”, he said during his trip. In any event, the current rebound “highlights”according to him, “the need for vulnerable people to continue to protect themselves” and wear the mask.
Several epidemiologists have noted that this restart of the epidemic is accompanied by a rise in power of the BA.2 sub-lineage of the omicron variant. Should we be worried about it? Last week, the epidemiologist in charge of simulations at the Institut Pasteur, Simon Cauchemez, wanted to be reassuring in Freedestimating that BA.2, the subvariant of omicron, “could slow down the decline, but not generate a significant upturn”. If there were to be a new wave, this one would rather be expected in the fall for many epidemiologists, “because of the weakening of immune memory and the return of short, cold days”, also explained to us Mircea Sofonea, lecturer at the University of Montpellier.
Asked about the interest of offering a fourth dose of vaccine, Olivier Véran recalled having contacted the High Authority for Health (HAS) on the subject: “We do not have the feedback for the moment from the scientific authorities, but it could seem coherent to open this fourth dose to fragile people.”