As in the United Kingdom, Omicron is establishing itself over the days in France.
Data posted online this Thursday evening by Public Health France, after ten days of "break", show that this variant is now the majority among new positive cases in the country and in all regions.
Hence the explosion of contaminations that we see (more than 200,000 new cases identified every day on average).
Nationally, 79% of positive cases over the week from December 27 to January 3 correspond to a suspicion of Omicron.
In detail region by region, those located in the northwest are the most affected.
In Île-de-France, where this variant became the majority just before Christmas, 83.9% of the contaminations identified every day now correspond to Omicron.
Several regions are around 80% and this share is only 69.6% in Corsica and 67.1% in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (Paca).
Delta is therefore still most present on the Mediterranean coast.
However, this one is more virulent than Omicron.
We can therefore expect that the number of Covid patients admitted to critical care in Paca, which is already reaching record levels, will continue to climb.
Signal "cut" at the end of December
These data come from the screening of positive PCR tests.
Each of them is supposed to be "screened", that is to say that we track down several mutations in its genome.
Until Christmas, only three of them were targeted: E484K, E484Q and L452R.
Luckily, Omicron doesn't sport L452R, unlike Delta.
Thus, one could easily obtain a suspicion of Omicron variant.
The concern is that other versions of SARS-CoV-2 are also in this situation.
Public Health France has therefore adapted and the agency asked the laboratories to track down four mutations specific to Omicron, combined in a D code. These are the ones that make it possible to obtain the rates mentioned above.
Read alsoCovid-19: Will Omicron be the “last variant” of SARS-CoV-2?
As laboratories adapt their methods and tools, previous data has become impossible to interpret.
The signal was therefore "cut".
But "it is not because these indicators are not in open data that we do not follow them", assured last Friday Bruno Coignard, at the head of the direction of the infectious diseases at the health agency.
"We share this data daily with the Ministry of Health," he said.
The data is therefore accessible again this Thursday evening, with this famous code D. But only at the regional level for the moment.
The agency noticed "inconsistencies" between the departmental figures it has and those collected locally by the health authorities.