Two years ago to the day, on March 16, 2020, Emmanuel Macron announced to the French the first confinement while the coronavirus was barely emerging. Under the supervision of the Ministry of Health, the French public health agency closely monitored the Covid-19 epidemic and published the figures every evening. Two years later, the lessons are numerous. Among them, the agency took the opportunity to modernize disease surveillance.
>> INFOGRAPHICS. Covid-19 figures: deaths, hospitalizations, vaccines… Follow the evolution of the epidemic in France and around the world
When the Covid swept over France, the government, journalists, but also citizens, quickly asked for figures. Number of cases, hospitalizations, deaths… Public Health France is responsible for reporting data from all hospitals and biology laboratories in the territory by publishing them on its website. Data that has been opened to everyone, “in open data”on the Geodes platform.
We had built the site so that it could hold around 500 connections per day, we went up to 700,000. With the Covid, we had to adapt the machines so that it could hold.
Yann Le Strat, manager of the Geodes siteat franceinfo
Previously, the site was used to identify winter illnesses such as influenza, bronchiolitis or gastroenteritis. Corn “for winter pathologies, updates were made every week. For the Covid, it was necessary to update every day. We had to show that everything we produced was correct, that we had nothing to hide and that we were there to help the citizen to be informed about the evolution of the epidemic.says Yann Le Strat.
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Today, Public Health France publishes nearly 150 indicators every day. Sometimes very precise indicators, such as the number of positive forties last week in Tarn-et-Garonne. To make these millions of data available, the agency had to create computer programs, build robust systems, explains Laetitia Huiart, scientific director. “We are on daily life 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Three or four years ago, did we think we could process such a volume of data every day? I’m not convinced.”
“This is the first time that we have followed an epidemic in real time. We are following it on all scales, on a global scale and on an ultra-fine neighborhood scale. This is something absolutely unprecedented. “
Laetitia Huiart, scientific directorat franceinfo
Public Health France installed in a large wooden building, glued to the Bois de Vincennes, at the gates of Paris, is teeming with hundreds of epidemiologists who analyze the figures and trends of the epidemic. Objective: to give particular indications to the government on the health policy to be carried out. In order to produce these figures, to bring them up from the ground, to consolidate them, it was necessary to hire new profiles, slips Pr Geneviève Chêne, Director General of Public Health France: “It gradually requires having a certain number of reinforcements, new skills, such as data scientist that we were able to recruit and mobilize during the crisis.”
In addition to this open data revolution, Public Health France has also had to improve in other areas, such as variant monitoring, for example. A sector in which France was lagging behind. The virus genome was practically not sequenced, a crucial element for understanding the appearance of a new variant capable of changing the course of an epidemic, as the Omicron variant was able to do.
“Before, we had systems but they were not as exhaustive and in real time. Moreover, we are currently working to try to sustain SIDEP and extend it to other diseases. It could be very useful for monitoring flu, hepatitis, HIV infection. There is real progress to be expected from the tools we developed during the Covid crisis.”
Bruno Coignard, member of the infectious diseases departmentat franceinfo
“Today, 54 laboratories are doing sequencing”explains Bruno Coignard, member of the infectious diseases department. “It was complicated at the start, but today France is the third country in Europe which sequences the most. We are better prepared, in particular thanks to SIDEP. It is a tool which makes it possible to centralize all the results of the covid tests done in any laboratory on French territory. It’s a dream for our epidemiologists.”he smiles.
At Public Health France, we plan in the future to identify, for example, the cases of cancer by municipality, district by district: an initiative which would allow the health authorities to act quickly in the event of an alert.