“It seems that we are leaving on a new wave,” says epidemiologist Antoine Flahault

“It seems that we are leaving on a new wave” of the Covid-19 epidemic, said Friday June 3 on franceinfo Professor Antoine Flahault, epidemiologist, director of the Institute of Global Health at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, while the number of cases of contamination is increasing in France according to Public Health France. This new wave “will be linked to these sub-variants that we had identified in southern Africa which have caused a real wave in Portugal in recent weeks, and which are called BA4 and BA5”specifies Antoine Flahault.

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Antoine Flahault believe that we “gets too used to this succession of waves”. But he notices “that there is a resumption of contamination”. According to him, “more and more, throughout Europe, when we sequence the genome of the viruses that we identify, they are more and more often BA4 and BA5”. He specifies that it is not only France “who is concerned”but also “the United Kingdom, Germany or Switzerland which are also at similar levels of rebound”. Antoine Flahault adds that another sub-variant “which has created a wave in recent weeks in the United States, is also a sub-variant of Omicron”.

Faced with this rebound, the epidemiologist does not note “something profoundly different”. “We know that vaccines work on serious forms. We could come back to this. But unfortunately, we are quite poorly protected from the transmission of the virus and mild forms for most of us.” According to him, we may have been contaminated by Omicron “this winter and redo the Covid in the weeks to come”.

But Antoine Flahault assures that he is “still time to get vaccinated and to have the complete schedule, the three doses, and maybe the fourth dose, so as not to have to suffer from serious forms of Covid”.