In a long interview, the Minister of Health François Braun answered questions from readers of the newspaper Le Parisien-Today in France. The Minister of Health affirms in particular that it is absolutely necessary to continue to isolate oneself when one tests positive for the coronavirus because today “one person still dies from Covid every ten minutes in France”.
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However, this assertion is false. To check the Minister’s calculation, we went to the Public Health France website. Each week, the organization publishes the number of patients with Covid-19 who died in hospital and, less regularly, the same data in what are called “medico-social establishments” such as nursing homes for example.
For the first week of November, there were 356 deaths of Covid patients in hospital. For medico-social establishments, the last report dates from the last week of October: there had been 18 deaths of patients with Covid, which therefore makes 374 in all over one week, or around 53 deaths per day. This therefore results in a death every 27 minutes, and not every 10 minutes as the Minister of Health says. Unless of course he has access to other data, but we contacted him and the ministry did not answer us.
What is certain in any case is that the epidemic is not over. The virus is still circulating since this Monday, November 14, Public Health France recorded more than 27,000 new cases in seven days. This is a third more than the previous week. And in the last week of November, more than 3,500 people sick with Covid had to be hospitalized.
Moreover, and this is what the Scientific Council concluded in its last opinion last July, it is likely that Covid will become a seasonal disease, with epidemic outbreaks, such as colds and angina.