“The situation is not out of control yet, but it will be.
I hear a lot that a week without confinement is a week won.
For me, it's a wasted week.
The words of the crisis director at Public Assistance - Paris Hospitals (AP-HP) Bruno Riou, this Monday morning on France Inter, must have cooled more than one in the Paris region upon waking up.
Almost a year to the day after the start of the first confinement, the health situation linked to Covid has deteriorated further in Île-de-France for a week.
Two symbolic thresholds are even in the process of being crossed: an incidence rate of 400 and the peak of patients in intensive care during the second wave.
Île-de-France "is clearly on borrowed time," also alerted France 2 to the president of the region, Valérie Pécresse.
But the government still hopes not to have to take new measures that would impact millions of Ile-de-France residents.
We take stock of this potentially explosive situation.
The incidence greater than 400 in four departments
The incidence rate, that is to say the number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants over the past week, reached 391 in Île-de-France.
The increase has been faster for four days than it was for the previous ten days.
But beware: the number of tests carried out each day has also significantly increased in recent days (+ 17% in ten days).
This may partly explain the increase in incidence because when you look for more, you find more.
In addition, as Le Parisien revealed on Sunday morning, the incidence rate posted at the national level is overestimated "of the order of 10%" compared to reality due to duplicates.
This difference varies according to the departments but it "does not impact the dynamics", assured us several sources.
However, the incidence rate increased in one week in each of the eight Ile-de-France departments.
Four departments are already above the threshold of 400: Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-d'Oise, Val-de-Marne and Seine-et-Marne.
400 is precisely a level that Jean Castex retained in his interview on the social network Twitch on Sunday evening.
Asked about the reconfinements on weekends on the coast of the Alpes-Maritimes and in the Pas-de-Calais, the Prime Minister replied that these measures had come into force "in departments when the incidence rate was 400 for 100,000 inhabitants ”, while it is“ still below in Île-de-France ”.
And "as long as these figures are not reached, we cannot take exactly the same measures", he added.
But it is not a "confinement threshold", hastened to specify Matignon to the Parisian.
"All the other indicators are taken into account in the consultations: hospital admissions, occupancy of sheave beds, etc.", indicates the entourage of the Prime Minister.
The government also considers it complicated to reconfigure a single Ile-de-France department because of the very large population flows and intense economic activity.
The peak in intensive care in November almost reached
Exactly, what is the situation at the hospital in Île-de-France?
Here too, the indicators are more in the red than a week ago.
1134 patients were hospitalized in intensive care on March 14, 174 more than a week earlier and almost as many as the peak of the “second wave” (1138 on November 12).
The intensive care occupancy rate, that is to say the number of patients with Covid-19 compared to the initial bed capacity, is now close to 100% (98.2%).
On the other hand, the daily number of admissions, on average over the past week, seems to stabilize around 105 for three days.
But this level is higher than the maximum reached in November (less than 100), and there are still more seriously ill patients entering intensive care than those leaving.
This could be explained in particular by the strong presence of the so-called “British” variant, which would cause more serious forms, in addition to being more contagious.
It now represents nearly three quarters of new cases in Île-de-France, according to data from Public Health France.
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Covid-19 in Ile-de-France: the inexorable rise in intensive care patients
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In order not to have to reconfine, the government is relying in particular on transfers of intensive care patients to other regions.
A hundred should have taken place by the end of the week, according to government spokesman Gabriel Attal.
Potentially, this could relieve hospital services in the Ile-de-France region by around 10%.
Vaccination is also accelerating and nearly 80,000 first-time injections were carried out on Friday and Saturday cumulatively.
But with only 6.2% of Ile-de-France residents who have received at least one dose of vaccine, it is still too much to see the benefits in the general population.
