“France has chosen a protocol that is a bit staged and not too hasty,” says an epidemiologist

By lifting health restrictions, “France has chosen a protocol that is a little layered and not too hasty”, estimated Wednesday, February 2 on franceinfo Antoine Flahault, epidemiologist, director of the Institute of Global Health at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, after the lifting of health restrictions. From this Wednesday, wearing a mask is no longer compulsory outdoors and teleworking is no longer imposed, but only recommended.

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According to the epidemiologist, the argument that the progression of a new variant will be blocked thanks to herd immunity “is an illusion”. “We saw it with Omicron, even people who had been vaccinated three times were infected, sometimes even twice infected, when they had just been infected with Delta”, notes Antoine Flahault. But according to him, immunity in the population, called cell-mediated immunity which protects against severe forms of the disease, is consolidating for the entire population apart from those at risk.

Antoine Flahault judges, however, that in certain European countries, such as Denmark where the epidemic continues to increase, “the lifting of the restrictions seems a little premature”. He believes that we can “at least take the trouble to wait for the epidemic to recede in France. France has chosen a protocol that is a little layered and not too hasty.”

“Waiting a bit for this decline to be confirmed seems important to me.”

Antoine Flahault, epidemiologist

at franceinfo

The epidemiologist believes that the measures should be “indexed or backed by health indicators” : “We could say: when we reach such a threshold, we will remove the mask. So tiering this de-escalation of measures seems to be something coherent, if the decline is confirmed.