Stop or again? While the Minister of Health is already talking about the end of the fifth wave of Covid-19, some scientists believe that the screening campaign must be put on hold. Nearly 50 million tests – a record – were carried out during the month of January, i.e. almost twice as many as in December 2021, an already very demanding month in terms of screening. franceinfo takes stock of the arguments of the two camps.
Those who want to continue testing massively are usually epidemiologists, whose role is to monitor the epidemic. They believe that if we want to have a very precise vision of the evolution of Covid-19 on our territory, we must continue to test a lot. With this Omicron variant – less dangerous than the Delta variant but very contagious – large-scale screening campaigns make it possible to isolate all the positives. A strategy whose objective is above all to break the chains of contamination.
Faced with “pro-tests”, many virologists and infectiologists defend another strategy: test less and better. According to them, testing everyone no longer makes sense. They then suggest screening only a sample of the population, as we do for the flu today. With Omicron, the number of contaminations no longer being correlated with the number of hospitalizations, it no longer really constitutes a reliable benchmark of the epidemic. The real benchmark is the number of patients in the hospital.
Another argument: carrying out millions of tests creates traffic jams in laboratories and pharmacies. The reliability of antigenic tests and self-tests is also questioned in their ability to identify Omicron as well as the previous variants. The hypothesis, which remains to be proven, would be that the tests would be less sensitive, less effective.
Why screen hundreds of thousands of cases a day? Some scientists consider that we have lost control of the epidemic and that it is therefore better to “let go” of this more benign virus with the hope of achieving a form of collective immunity. By following this logic, the tests would be reserved primarily for people at risk of having a serious form of the disease.
Last shocking argument: testing massively, it is very expensive for Medicare. Twenty euros for an antigen test, around forty for a PCR test, not to mention the distribution of self-tests to children. The bill amounts, for the month of January alone, to 1.6 billion euros, which is what the government had initially planned for the whole of this year 2022. Olivier Véran promised Wednesday evening to lower the cost of these tests. The Minister of Health also wants to encourage more use of self-tests, which are less expensive.