VIDEO – Gérald Kierzek on the masks: “Rest assured, the coronavirus does not jump on you in the street”

Since this Friday morning, we have to go out and hide again in many departments or cities, such as in the Paris region or in Lyon. A measure taken to try to curb the Omicron variant, which explodes the Covid-19 contaminations. Corn “aren’t we doing a little too much?“with her, Jacques Legros asks the emergency doctor Gerald Kierzek on the set of 13H TF1, in the video at the top of this article.

In the eyes of the TF1 and LCI health consultant, this actually makes “part of the measures a little inconsistent, or in any case not very effective“. Indeed, he continues, with the hindsight we now have on the epidemic, we know that the coronavirus”spreads indoors and not outdoors, in enclosed areas that are poorly ventilated. And finally, a lot of studies now show it’s on the inside and not on the outside.“He wants a study as proof”pretty funny“carried out on football fields, with an analysis of 1247 amateur and professional matches. As shown in the infographic below, it ended with 104 matches with infected players, and no identified transmission.

Why ? Because two conditions are necessary to be able to be contaminated, recalls Gérald Kierzek: first “a significant amount of virus. You have to be exposed to a viral inoculum, to a large amount of virus particles. And the second condition is that you need an exposure time, a relatively long contact time. And it’s not when you run into someone on the street, for example, that you have these two conditions met. “

But Omicron, underlines Jacques Legros, could change the situation since we know that it is transmitted more easily. “You are right, answers Gérald Kierzek, because these studies, they date from a few months ago, before the appearance of the Omicron variant, which is indeed more contagious“. With him, “one could imagine that contagiousness could occur in outdoor places, but there still has to be a high population density. I am thinking of markets, for example, where there would be a lot of people and the social distance, the safety distance of 1 or 2 meters, could not be respected. There, why not, indeed, the mask on the outside would be useful“. And the emergency doctor concludes:”But rest assured, the coronavirus does not jump on you when passing someone in the street. “