From wave to wave, where was the health crisis just a year ago? At the beginning of December 2020, we were still in confinement, “light confinement”. The non-essential businesses had just reopened, but obviously there was no question of going to the restaurant, the cinema or the museum. The incidence, the number of positive cases per 100,000 inhabitants, was then three times lower than today. We are now at 411 cases per 100,000 inhabitants but a year ago, the intensive care occupancy rate was higher: 60% against 40% currently in France. The two contexts have nothing to do, because vaccination has been there.
Does this mean that today, in the midst of the fifth wave of Covid-19, it is no longer the incidence figures that should alert but rather those of hospitalizations? Indeed, since more than 75% of French people have received two doses of the vaccine and 10 million French people have even received their booster dose: the number of serious cases and the circulation of the virus are automatically reduced. It doesn’t really make sense to compare the impacts with those of 2020.
But it is the situation in the hospital which is currently alert. The number of intensive care admissions is up 44% from last week. And remember that if two doses protect more than 90% against severe forms of Covid, this protection drops to 50% after six months against the Delta variant. Hence the importance of recall. However, as the entire population is not vaccinated or will not immediately get an appointment for its booster dose, indeed, these hospitalization figures are of concern.
Models from the Pasteur Institute show that an improvement in barrier gestures may be enough to halve the impact of the current wave, the peak of which is expected at the end of January. This means strengthening the wearing of masks, ventilation, teleworking. Some epidemiologists also plead for the return of gauges in public places or the return of the sanitary bubble: that is to say that we limit the number of people we see regularly.
If we want to preserve the hospital at Christmas time, these barrier gestures must be applied immediately, insists the infectious disease specialist Benjamin Davido, because we must be aware that the patients who will arrive at the hospital between the 25 and on December 31, are people who will be contaminated in the next ten days.