THEThe executive and Parliament have just debated the strategy to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. The big ones forgotten in this important debate are the 15 million children and adolescents whom the fourth wave will hit hard in the coming weeks. The generalization of the sanitary pass, a flagship measure of bill adopted on Sunday July 25, does not concern them: children under 12 were exempt from it from the outset, and this will ultimately also be the case, until the end of September, for adolescents, who have had access to vaccination since June 15 but whose coverage vaccine does not exceed 10% to date. Teaching places were immediately excluded from the scope of application.
In Parliament, minors were only mentioned through the prism of vaccination of 12-18 year olds, through amendments from all sides fighting, fortunately without success, that they be subject to the health pass for their leisure activities. : the preventive measures would then weigh on them with a disproportionate weight, they say, compared to a virus generous enough to spare them. This is to reason in an epidemiological framework that the reality of the start of the school year will make completely obsolete.
No device in the strategy to combat the fourth wave targets the protection of children and adolescents. However, they are the ones who will be on the front line between now and the start of the school year. Two factors now reinforce their fragility: the increased contagiousness of the Delta variant; and the vaccination of older age groups, better vaccinated than them, which therefore increases the pressure of the virus on them. Before the summer, minors already represented 25% of the cases detected. They could soon account for 50% of contaminations, according to the latest models.
At the peak, from September, in a median scenario where there would then be 100,000 new cases per day, there would therefore be 50,000 children and adolescents infected each day. These projections from the Institut Pasteur (Hozé et al., July 9, 2021 ; Bosetti et al., July 13, 2021), accessible to all and regularly updated on its site, are considered likely even with the positive impact of the generalization of the health pass on the rhythm of vaccinations.
Alarming outlook
Despite these alarming prospects, it remains very difficult in our country to speak about the reality of the Covid risk among minors. Several factors explain it. The relief, first, in the spring of 2020, to find that severe forms of the infection were extremely rare for them. The uncertainty, then, on their role in the viral circulation throughout the period of confinement. Concern, too, for their mental health, affected by confinement, periods of long-distance schooling, and the very violence of this epidemic which disrupts their daily lives and their families. The sanctuary, finally, of the school imperative: the President of the Republic, at the opening of his speech of July 12, summoned the French to the pride of belonging to one of the nations which has closed its schools the least.
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