72 departments are still on health "alert" because of the Covid-19.
The Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, unveiled this Thursday evening, as every week, the new map of France for the epidemic.
Morbihan and Nièvre leave the list, but Mayenne and Lot-et-Garonne are added.
Eight metropolises are now on “heightened alert”.
There are, in particular, Toulouse, Rennes and Montpellier.
Dijon and Clermont-Ferrand are added to the list which will come into force on Saturday.
Note: the entire territory of the departments where these towns are located is not, however, on heightened alert (which implies additional restrictions).
The metropolitan areas of Lille, Grenoble, Saint-Etienne and Lyon are on “maximum alert”.
Montpellier and Toulouse could follow by Monday.
In this category, the Aix-Marseille metropolis and the inner suburbs (including Paris and the three neighboring departments) still appear.
The switch to "maximum alert" should lead to new more restrictive measures, announced in the coming days.
As in the Paris region and Marseille, bars and other places open to the public could be forced to close their doors.
On Wednesday, Emmanuel Macron had also warned that it was necessary to "go towards more restrictions" in areas where the Covid-19 "circulates too fast".
Macron's warning
As a reminder, three indicators are taken into account to establish these maps: the incidence rate (the number of new cases per 100,000 inhabitants over one week) in the general population and that among those 65 and over at the scale of the metropolitan area, as well as the occupancy rate of Covid patients in intensive care at the regional level.
For the maximum alert, the thresholds are, respectively, 250, 100, and 30%.
The Directorate General of Health (DGS) tells us that a manual analysis of the situation is carried out in parallel, which means that a territory can "switch" to a higher alert level a little before having reached the three thresholds if the epidemic situation worsens.
