From confinements to curfews, including school closures and vaccinations, researchers have just published an estimate of the effectiveness of the health measures put in place by the government to deal with the pandemic.
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Four years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, research continues to take stock. We now have the figures on the health impact of confinement, curfew or vaccination. This long-term work was carried out by researchers from Bordeaux University Hospital, Inserm (National Institute of Medical Research) and Inria (research institute in digital science and technologies) and made public on Tuesday February 6 .
By combining mathematical models and the figures for deaths and hospitalizations collected between March 2020 and October 2021 in each department, they were able to establish that the first confinement was very effective in allowing a reduction in the transmission of the covid virus by 84 %. The curfew also helped slow viral transmission: especially when it started early with a curfew at 6 p.m. The drop in transmissions was 68%. With that of 8 p.m., it was only 48%. Finally, the closure of schools made it possible to reduce viral transmission by only 15%. This measure therefore had much less impact than curfews, and even than the weather because the simple fact of being in summer reduced viral transmission by at least 20% compared to other seasons. The heat of the period and the fact of living more outdoors took their toll.
The importance of the vaccine
To find out the impact of the vaccine, the researchers modeled the scenario of a situation without a vaccine until October 2021, while the vaccination campaign started in retirement homes in December 2020, 10 months earlier. Without a vaccine over these 10 months, France would have recorded twice as many deaths, there would have been 159,000 more deaths, as well as a million additional hospitalizations.
These data collected can, retrospectively, make it possible to organize in the event of a new pandemic, because they confirm the importance of health responsiveness at the start of a crisis. A confinement established a week earlier would have made it possible to avoid 20,000 additional deaths, this work also indicates. This is crucial information, because we have seen to what extent confining a country is a socially and economically burdensome choice.
