Doctors had been alerting for several weeks, and it is now official for the government: France is experiencing a real resumption of its epidemic.
"We have entered a fourth wave of the virus," government spokesman Gabriel Attal said at a press conference Monday evening.
"If we start from a low number of contaminations, the dynamics of the epidemic are extremely strong, we are seeing a faster wave, a steeper slope than all the previous ones," he added. He wanted to be alarming: "We start from the bottom but this wave can rise very quickly and it can rise very high". On Friday, France exceeded for the first time since May the threshold of 10,000 new contaminations, and on Monday, 7,041 patients were hospitalized because of an infection linked to Covid-19. “An increase of this type so strong, so sudden, we had never experienced since the start of the epidemic in our country. The number of new cases detected has doubled in one week, ”said Gabriel Attal.
In France, the incidence rate has increased by 125% in one week: there are 86 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 inhabitants over a sliding week.
The government spokesman spoke Monday morning of an increase in the "stratospheric" incidence rate.
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At the origin of this resumption of the epidemic: the Delta variant, previously nicknamed the Indian variant.
This variant is particularly contagious, since an infected person would be contagious two days earlier than with the original strain.
It currently represents 80% of Covid-19 contaminations in France according to Gabriel Attal.
In the United Kingdom, it has led to a very rapid increase in the number of cases: for several days, the number of new daily cases has been around 50,000.
To hope to contain this fourth wave, the French government is therefore betting on vaccination: "Vaccination limits the number of serious forms but it remains insufficient in our country" declared Gabriel Attal on Monday. According to the Directorate General of Health, the milestone of 45% of the total fully vaccinated population was reached on Sunday. In addition, 37,523,594 people received at least one injection (more than 55.7% of the total population).
