Covid-19: no reconfinement in France ... but until when?

Everyone thinks about it.

Nobody wants it.

Many European countries have already taken the plunge towards re-containment.

Portugal and Austria are reconfining, Germany is doing it in a prolonged and reinforced way until mid-February and England in a very strict way until the beginning of March to deal with an epidemic outbreak which seems uncontrollable beyond Handle.

The decision has not yet been taken in France.

If the subject was put on the table during the last council of ministers, the government is procrastinating.

"A new Defense Council will be held next Wednesday (

Editor's note: January 27

) and, barring an explosion of new cases, especially in intensive care, there will be no speech by the President of the Republic, nor announcements of new measures, ”says one in the entourage of Emmanuel Macron.

Concrete elements allow the executive to postpone, again, the decision to reconfine.

For how long ?

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In recent days, the main indicators of the effects of the pandemic have been on the rise again: hospital admissions (25,735 patients Thursday, January 21, or 49 more in 24 hours) and in intensive care units (2,876 patients, or 24 more people than the day before).

However, a figure has come to curb these increases: the incidence rate - that is to say the number of new cases recorded per 100,000 inhabitants over a week - has stabilized around 190 nationally for several days.

A saving curfew?

It is certainly still too early to be able to measure an effect of the advancement over the entire territory of the 6 p.m. curfew.

The government nevertheless fully relies on this last constraint, on the basis of its demonstrated effectiveness, according to the Ministry of Health, in the fifteen departments where it came into force on January 2.

Two weeks later, the incidence rate showed a slight decrease in ten departments concerned.

The health defense council next Wednesday will allow the executive to see more clearly.

“The curfew had proved its worth in September in Marseille and a little later in other territories, observes Jean-Stéphane Dhersin, scientific deputy director of the National Institute of Mathematical Sciences and their interactions of the CNRS (Insmi-CNRS) .

This time again, the effects of his advancement are significant.

The question is: is that enough?

"

No epidemic wave after the holidays

The epidemic outbreak, with the appearance of clusters all over France in the weeks following the end of the year celebrations, did not happen.

"The Christmas effect was hardly felt and the New Year did not cause an explosion as one might fear", confirms Jean-Stéphane Dhersin.

Philippe Amouyel, professor of public health at the University Hospital of Lille, is on the same observation: “Unlike Americans and Canadians, we have not had a peak of contamination or transmission after the Christmas holidays when family transmissions are the most important.

The French did a lot of tests before the holidays, protected themselves, which explains why the positivity rate is decreasing.

Once the holidays have passed, the vaccine has arrived and people begin to understand that it is thanks to vaccination that we will get by.

"

A downside all the same, noted by Jean Daniel Lelièvre, head of department at the CHU Henri-Mondor, in Créteil (Val-de-Marne): “We did not see a peak of contamination linked to SARS-CoV 2 after Christmas , but we didn't see anything coming down either.

We simply minimized the damage without going back to the levels of the first confinement in June, and there it starts again… ”

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In the eyes of health authorities and many doctors, the way out of the crisis remains very fragile, especially in the face of the threat of Covid-19 variants.

"The re-containment will depend above all on the progression of the English variant in France," said Anne-Claude Crémieux, infectious disease specialist at Saint-Louis hospital in Paris.

This is THE parameter that risks accelerating the epidemic.

We know that the non-mutant strain responds to the curfew but if we refer to the English experience, we must now raise the level of these measures a notch to manage to control this new variant which is 50% more transmissible.

"