We have entered the 5th wave of the coronavirus epidemic, with the number of contaminations and the incidence increasing very rapidly. TO the origin of this new wave: the Delta variant. Another variant reported since November 24: Omicron.
Emmanuelle Daviet: Covid news is once again occupying the media space, and we can see it very clearly in the emails of listeners. How do you treat this news, what place do you give it on the air?
Matthieu Mondoloni: All in all, it is given a fairly important place, depending on the events. When there is a new fact of the day, such as the appearance of this new Omicron variant, and of course, explanatory papers are made. We have guests, doctors, epidemiologists who come to explain to us what this variant is? Is it dangerous or not dangerous? Do you have to protect yourself? How to fight against this variant? Is the vaccination effective? In short, all the questions that arise at such times?
As regards the number of cases of contamination, it is also explained, and it is explained by taking precautions, that is to say by also avoiding being too anxiety-provoking, by giving information that is always put in perspective in relation to what we have known before.
Precisely, this 5th wave worries the French. How to inform without making the information anxious?
I think that it starts with the choice of the guests that we have on the air. Guests are very important. Since the beginning of this health crisis, there are now almost two years, a number of epidemiologists, virologists, vaccinologists, members of the scientific council, the Government Vaccine Mister.
We have specialists who are known and recognized, whom we interview on the air and who can enlighten us by making them talk once again about what they know. That is to say, we are not going to hire a general practitioner to talk to us about vaccination, at least on the specifics of the vaccine. He is not a vaccinologist. He will be able to tell us what is going on in his office. We are not going to take an epidemiologist to tell us about the daily testimony of the patients he receives, since that is not necessarily his job either.
We get people to talk about what they know best, we put them on the air. They also come to reassure listeners. We recently made the doctor Benjamin Damidot, guest of the 8:30 am of franceinfo, who was very reassuring, obviously, with the listeners, by saying “watch out for the appearance of this new variant”. Admittedly, it is worrying, it is necessary to look. But at the same time, we don’t know anything about it.
We don’t know if it’s more dangerous than the Delta, if it’s more contagious, it’s going to take time. So, we have people who are not overly reassuring, but in any case who speak correctly about the matter without being yet anxiety-provoking.
Since the start of the health crisis, almost two years ago, franceinfo has implemented a lot of interactivity with listeners. How do you maintain this connection with them?
So we continue to do it. We recently did what we call on franceinfo, and listeners know it: “We answer you”. We put the listeners on the air, they can call us on the number that we usually set up, and we have our experts in front of them. We had Olivier Emond, the head of the environmental health service and we had the doctor I was telling you about earlier, who was able to answer the questions that listeners were asking themselves about vaccination, about the epidemic, on what to do, what not to do, etc. So this link is very important.
And then we have the franceinfo.fr website as well. We have questions that come up regularly, which always abound with this hashtag “# onvousrépond”, this hash word, we answer you and which we answer either on the website, or again on radio sequences.
Since November 26, the WHO has designated the variant B.1.1.529 by the Greek letter Omicron (e). We have received many messages from listeners who do not understand this pronunciation, considering that we must pronounce Omicron and that Omicrone would be an English pronunciation. So there is no real debate?
There is no real debate. I plead guilty on an Anglicism. It can happen that our journalists on the air sometimes use them and they are wrong to do so. There, in this case, it is not an Anglicism, it is the way it is pronounced in Greek.
Besides, we don’t say epsilon and we say epsilone for the Greek letter, it’s the same for omicron, quite simply. And then, I add that this phonetic form is rigorously validated in the dictionaries Le Robert, Larousse and by the French Academy, which confirms the pronunciation “omicrone”.