Circulation of the virus among the elderly, number of "clusters" and now even number of deaths: "All indicators" of a worsening of the Covid-19 epidemic are present, warns Public Health France on Friday, which sees it as a signal inviting more vigilance.
"For the first time since the lifting of confinement, we have seen an increase in deaths for Covid-19", with a doubling to 265 deaths, after 129 the previous week, underlines the health agency in its last weekly update.
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"These are deaths that are observed both in hospitals and in nursing homes for the elderly," said Sophie Vaux, epidemiologist at Public Health France, during an online press briefing.
"If young adults (20 to 30 years old) are currently the most affected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus has been progressing in recent weeks among those 75 and over", with a rate of new cases up 45%. last week in this age group "likely to develop the most serious forms of the disease", according to the health agency.
68 Ehpad clusters
“The clusters that have occurred in nursing homes are also on the rise”, with 68 grouped outbreaks of contagion detected in these establishments last week, ie nearly double compared to the previous week (37).
"The intensification of the spread of the virus among the oldest people raises fears of the continuation of hospitalizations and deaths in the weeks to come", underlines Public Health France.
She recalls that "serious forms leading to hospitalizations, admissions to intensive care units and deaths occur with a delay of approximately two weeks after the onset of the disease".
+ 48 increases in intensive care
Indicators of the epidemic in the hospital, which started to rise again for two months, continued to deteriorate last week, with "an increase in emergency room visits for suspected Covid-19 (+ 50%), news hospitalizations (+ 45%), as well as intensive care admissions (+ 48%) ”.
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"These increases support the need to protect the most vulnerable" and show that "the adoption by all of all preventive measures is essential", underlines Public Health France.
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Indeed, if the adoption of the mask has clearly increased in the population in recent weeks, the other barrier measures (physical distance, hand washing, no hugging or shaking hands) are less well respected than at the beginning of the epidemic, according to the agency's latest surveys.
Being able to test more
The health agency observes, however, that the rate of increase in the number of new cases is slowing (only + 8% last week), but it attributes it to a "probable underestimation" of the number of cases of infection, " due to the saturation of diagnostic capacities in certain regions ”.
An obstacle that has consequences on the health situation, warned Daniel Lévy-Bruhl, head of the respiratory infections unit at Public Health France.
“Not being able to test people for whom control measures are still relevant may have a bearing on controlling the epidemic,” he said.
Weak collective immunity
Public Health France also publishes the result of a “seroprevalence” study conducted with the Pasteur Institute, which concludes that at the end of confinement, in mid-May, only 4.9% of French people had been infected with the new coronavirus (or 3.3 million people) and only 3.3% of the population had developed neutralizing antibodies.
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These first estimates, which will be supplemented by a new study soon, "show that the level of collective immunity is too low to allow control of viral circulation", analyzes the agency.
