Lifting of health restrictions: "The positive evolution of the epidemic is going faster than expected"

Renowned epidemiologist at the Institut Pasteur and member of the scientific council, Professor Arnaud Fontanet had not seen the improvement come so quickly.

Happy with this pleasant surprise, he considers the reduction of the measures reasonable but warns: it is necessary to take the opportunity to be vaccinated because September could be difficult.

Is it reasonable to lift the curfew ten days earlier than expected?

ARNAUD FONTANET.

The situation lends itself to it.

The improvement in the epidemic is considerable.

Its positive development is going faster than expected.

We are all pleasantly surprised by the speed with which the cases are decreasing!

From there, the passage to the next stage, which is the return to normal life, is not illogical.

You have to do it in a smart way, but I really think people get it.

You talk about "normal life" ... Are we there?

No, we cannot say that, but we are on the way and so much the better.

To achieve this, the key will be

we vaccinate, we vaccinate, we vaccinate

.

Why this surprise decline?

I can not help but draw a parallel with last year: in May and last June, the virus was already flush with the daisies.

This year, the weather conditions are even more favorable.

We have a dry heat that the virus hates.

It surely accentuates the 50% less contamination that we have in the summer.

But beware, this will not be enough to last.

What will take over is the vaccination coverage rate.

It must be as high as possible in September.

Read also End of wearing a mask outdoors and curfew: how Macron decided to lift the constraints

Why exactly this month?

A threat is coming, the Indian variant.

We must look carefully at what is happening in Great Britain, their situation foreshadows what we will experience in France at the start of the school year.

The English are two and a half months ahead.

I don't have a crystal ball but by then, the most plausible is that the Indian variant, 50% more transmissible than the British, has become the majority in our territory.

It remains to know its virulence.

If the increase in cases across the Channel is accompanied by an increase in hospitalizations, this will not be a good sign for us.

Especially if it happens to us in September, a month away from a change in climate that will be favorable to the virus.

This is why a few weeks ago you said it was too early to take off the mask, even outside.

There, we do it this Thursday ...

Since then, the level of circulation of the virus has gone down so low that the likelihood of you being in front of an infected person is very low.

Officially 3,000 cases per day, so really 6,000. That makes about sixty per department

(Editor's note: France has 101)

, with people contagious for four to five days.

If you multiply 60 by five, that means 300 contagious people per department who are walking around.

Talking face to face, outdoors, with one of them is a low risk.

What about the Music Day, the France-Portugal match that will be held next week?

I am not naive, I know that people will keep their distance during concerts and that they will not stop screaming during the match. Let's try to keep the right gestures as much as possible. But above all, if Indian clusters are formed, they must be traced immediately. Tracking down this variant and vaccinating are our two imperatives.