THE QUESTION.
"No case of the Indian variant has been identified in mainland France
,
"
said Olivier Véran, Minister of Solidarity and Health, after a visit to the Regional Health Agency in Île-de-France. , Tuesday April 27.
Many European countries have already spotted it on their soil such as Belgium, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and Portugal.
Is this statement too optimistic?
Or is it comparable to the declarations of the start of the Covid-19 crisis, at the beginning of 2020, where French experts assured that the epidemic was not to be feared in France as it began to be rife in Italy?
To discover
Covid-19: instructions for use of self-tests
Read also: Mandatory quarantine: are the planned checks sufficient?
CHECKS.
At least two cases of the Indian variant have been spotted in France ... but in an overseas department in Guadeloupe, according to official data published by France. As for the situation in the metropolis, the assertion of the Minister of Health seems true ... but it is a little reckless. It is true because on April 27, just before the declaration of the Minister of Health, a report from the Scientific Council noted that
"the B.1.617 variant has not been detected so far on French territory"
.
But in its weekly epidemiological update, published the same day, the World Health Organization specifies that the Indian variant B.1.617, in its three forms, was spotted by the sequencing method (which consists of looking at the entire genome of the virus) in at least seventeen countries around the world. In addition to countries far removed from France such as the United States, Canada, Australia or Singapore, the three families of the Indian variant have been spotted in Europe. This is particularly the case in Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and also in other countries bordering or close to France (Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Italy and the Netherlands). So, even if France has not yet detected the variant, and has suspended flights from India, it does notis not at all certain that the Indian mutant is not already present in our territory.
Quality of sequencing
"The absence of proof is not the proof of the absence"
, recalls the geneticist Philippe Froguel, professor at the University of Lille-2 and at the Imperial College in London.
In other words, a CCTV camera in a country will only record crimes committed in its viewing angle.
The same would apply for the Indian variant in France.
There is a high risk of not being spotted, because the number of sequencing performed each week would not be sufficient or obtained quickly enough to confirm that it is absent.
“What matters is the quality of the sequencing that is done, not the quantity. We have not yet identified the Indian variant. But this will perhaps be the case in one or two weeks ”
, tempers Prof. Jean-Michel Pawlotsky, virologist at the CHU Henri-Mondor, in Créteil, who coordinates one of the four sequencing platforms in France.
The ANRS Emerging Infectious Diseases and the Public Health France agency supervise the sequencing carried out in four public or parapublic laboratories in France (in Lyon, Paris, Créteil and Marseille).
For now, private groups are being left out in the sequencing effort.
But they should soon be contributing to it.
"Flash surveys"
This will make it possible to expand the “flash surveys” which reflect the circulation of variants, but the results of which do not arrive at best with a fifteen day delay. At the beginning of January, the circulation of the English variant had in particular been minimized when it arrived on French territory. And the same was true for the South African variant in Metz in February. Would it be the same for the Indian variant?
On April 27, just before the declaration of the Minister of Health, a report from the Scientific Council noted that
"the B.1.617 variant has not been detected so far on French territory"
.
But this report also specifies that
“a group of 43 nursing students from India arrived on April 12, 2021 at Charles-de-Gaulle airport before reaching Belgium.
24 of them were positive for this B.1.617 variant ”
.
Therefore, an investigation is underway.
Read also: India sinks under the second wave of Covid-19
And although few cases have been spotted in Europe to date, the Indian variant shows worrying characteristics, with a mutation (E484Q) that had not been spotted before. It also carries a mutation (L452R) carried by the two Californian variants
"which has been associated with an increase in their transmissibility"
, specifies the WHO report. These are spreading 20% faster than the historic Wuhan virus.
