The Minister of Health is preparing to travel to Marseille this Thursday afternoon to tighten the bolts. In the second largest city in France, as in the rest of the Bouches-du-Rhône, the acceleration of the Covid-19 epidemic is starting to give you a cold sweat. Long classified as a good student, is the department where Professor Didier Raoult is based, in the process of becoming a donkey's cap?
Intake in intensive care is accelerating there: 24 more in a week, or 40 people in total, according to the latest assessment of the ARS of Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur (Paca). As for the number of people positive for the coronavirus (the incidence rate in medical jargon), it “explodes” bluntly alert the ARS on Twitter, evoking “177 infected people per 100,000 inhabitants” in the city of Marseille alone, more than five times the average rate at the national level. Contaminations which do not spare OM players: eight of them are positive or suspected to be.
Faced with this revival in the Marseille city, the prefecture has released the heavy weapon: since Wednesday, if you want to sip a beer or a pastis, no longer question of lingering on the terraces. For bars, restaurants and all general food shops, it is compulsory to close at 11 p.m. and wear a mask in all the streets.
"There is the electroshock"
For Sandra, a waitress in a bar in the city center and who has stopped calling customers overheated in the evening by alcohol on barrier gestures to order - “too heavy” she said -, it's all the same. a little stiff… "OK so that we can talk more, there are too many who think that the virus is not for them, but this is the electroshock…" End of the summer recess?
“The objective which is aimed at Marseilles is, obviously, to avoid the regrouping of people who celebrate, notes, Laurent Filleul, epidemiologist of Public health France in New Aquitaine. Will this be enough? We will see, in any case, if we do not want the start of the school year to turn out badly, now is the time to do everything to curb the virus. "
Marseille and its surroundings, where tourist traffic jumped by 30% this summer, are not the only ones to find themselves in the "red". Eleven departments are now listed as “high vulnerability”. This is particularly the case for Loiret, Sarthe and Gironde… Clearly, the “holiday” effect, for the Bordelais Laurent Filleul. “People come back from vacation, they went to see friends, relatives, have a party. This was to be expected, ”he notes. But from there to anticipate such a relaxation in the respect of barrier gestures ... "It was really very important, it contributes to the current acceleration that we are witnessing", he believes.
Increased cases in 45-64 year olds
"And if new clusters emerge, it is also, he continues, because of the comings and goings on both sides of the Pyrenees: a lot of French people went to Spain, as well as Spaniards fleeing the confinement. in their country, came to blow on the Atlantic coast. "
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For the moment, near Bordeaux, there is hardly any more hospitalization, but "in three weeks, the number of positive cases has multiplied by five, we are still at 1,800 against 281" , the expert alarmed. Another point worries him: it is not only in young people that the virus is circulating more and more, in adults too, "in 45-64 year olds, it increases considerably", he says. Red alert ? “Yes, in this new school year, it is the elderly and frail who are most threatened by this degradation. So when we visit them, we do not approach, it is the mask plus the distance, ”he begs.