This is the question that has been rising in recent days: is France testing too much, or not enough, against Covid-19? For the past few days, we have been hearing a bit of everything and its opposite about the number of tests carried out.
For example, last week on BFM TV, Prime Minister Jean Castex said that we were almost world champions. “France is the second country in the world to be tested. We can say that it is not enough, that there are queues, that we have to wait… All of this is fair, but we have gone all out and we test a lot.” And conversely on franceinfo, MEP Les Républicains Brice Hortefeux largely relativized the screening capacity in France: “The government prides itself on having a million tests a day. The UK is ten million a day!”
No jealousy: neither of them is right. On the one hand, Brice Hortefeux greatly exaggerates the number of tests in the United Kingdom. It’s not ten million a day, but rather around a million and a half, that is to say a little more, but not much more, than in France.
On the other side, Jean Castex is also exaggerating because it is not just the United Kingdom to be ahead of us: this is also the case for Cyprus, Austria, Greece, Denmark or from Portugal. France is rather around 7th place, according to the site our world in data which compiles numerous health data around the world, including the number of tests per inhabitants and per country.
What is certain is that there are still a lot of tests carried out every day in France. In the first week of January alone, over nine million were made. We are approaching 12 million this week, according to Olivier Véran. Record figures driven in particular by extensive screening among children,
but also because of the more contagious Omicron variant. By way of comparison, a year ago, in December 2020, we tested three to four times less than today.
Several members of the medical community also believe that this screening is too broad, and call for better targeting, as for example in Israel, where PCRs are mainly reserved for people over 60 and frail people, to avoid bottlenecking the screening system.