With our eyes riveted on the indicators, we wonder: will we be able to regain more freedom on December 15?
It is on this date that a curfew must replace confinement.
But on two conditions: that the number of new cases has fallen to 5,000 per day, and that there are "between 2,500 to 3,000 people in intensive care".
These are the objectives set by Emmanuel Macron in his speech on November 24.
If he did not mention these figures during his press conference on Thursday, Prime Minister Jean Castex recalled that a new stage could only open in ten days "if the current trend continues and therefore if we remain vigilant ”.
So where are we now?
New cases decline more slowly
Let's start with positive people.
Every evening, Public Health indicates how many new cases of Covid-19 have been reported to it during the past 24 hours.
Since November 18, they are divided into two categories: those by PCR test and those by antigenic test.
Warning: when we talk about a target of 5,000 cases per day, it is actually a daily average over the last seven days.
Indeed, as many laboratories are closed on Sundays, the number of new cases announced on Monday evening is very often much lower than the other days of the week.
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This Friday, there were 10,348 new cases per day on average.
This is 38% less than on November 24.
But the pace of decline has declined sharply in recent days, as our chart shows.
This could be explained in particular by the easing of containment measures on November 28 or by seasonality, but we cannot yet establish it formally for the moment.
It should also be noted that we are seeing a similar slowdown in the decline in several of our neighboring countries.
“Until last week, it was projected that the number of cases would drop below 5,000 before December 15.
In recent days, there has been a sharp slowdown in the dynamics and, if this trend is confirmed, our models show that we will not be below 5000 before December 15, ”comments Simon Cauchemez, research director at the Institute. Pastor.
Everything will now depend on the evolution of the reproduction number "R", corresponding to the number of people that an infected individual will contaminate on average.
It can be calculated in different ways, from new cases, emergency room visits, or hospitalizations.
Falling back to 0.58 at the end of November, it stabilized and is now even slightly higher.
"We could still reach 5,000 new cases per day on the 15th provided that this R does not rise further," points out epidemiologist Antoine Flahault.
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"You should not be a fetishist with numbers, whether you are at 5,000 or 6,000 is not extremely different," he adds in the process.
Moreover, the government could always decide to end the confinement even if we were very slightly above the announced objectives.
"We will have to reassess the situation"
Now let's move on to the situation at the hospital.
3,283 patients were hospitalized in critical care on Friday, which actually includes those in intensive care units, those in intensive care, and those under continuous surveillance.
We were at 4277 on November 24, the day of Emmanuel Macron's speech, and at 4903 on November 16, when the peak was reached.
The good news is that this number of occupied beds has been falling steadily and at a roughly continuous rate for almost three weeks.
"We have more margins for the 3,000 patients in intensive care on December 15, because we are getting very close," reassures Simon Cauchemez.
In a note dated November 30, revealed by Le Monde and that the Parisian has also obtained, his team for mathematical modeling of infectious diseases estimates that there will be "between 1600 and 2600 beds in critical care occupied by Covid patients -19 December 15 ”.
Everything will depend on the different parameters, in particular the number of reproductions but also the average length of hospitalization.
Another point in the right direction is that the number of daily ICU admissions has also declined significantly.
It went from nearly 400 in mid-November to 166 this Friday (on average over the last seven days).
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Nonetheless, it is possible that transmissions of the virus began to increase again a few days before the lockdown was eased on November 28.
“This is not a scenario that we had explored.
We are going to have to redo our models to reassess the situation, ”admits the Institut Pasteur researcher.