where is the decline in the epidemic?

After more than two years of pandemic, how is the patient in France? The health situation is “great improvement”said Wednesday, May 4, the government spokesman, Gabriel Attal, promising, without further details, “adjustments in the coming weeks”. Franceinfo dives into the latest data to measure the extent of this decline.

>> Covid-19 figures: deaths, hospitalizations, vaccines… Follow the evolution of the epidemic in France and around the world

Positive cases: a sharp decline in one week

On Wednesday, nearly 48,000 new daily cases were recorded by Public Health France, against more than 73,000 a week earlier. The rolling weekly average is now around 46,000 daily cases (compared to 140,000 at the start of April), unheard of since December 2021.

The incidence rate, which stood at 547 new cases per week per 100,000 inhabitants on Sunday, remains well above the alert threshold, set at 50 by the government, but it continues to fall. It is in Seine-Saint-Denis that it is the lowest (284). Conversely, the most affected departments are Reunion (1,300), Haute-Corse (769) and Corse-du-Sud (743). The overseas territories are the only ones to have seen their incidence increase in recent days.

In its last epidemiological point, at the end of April, Public Health France also noted a “decrease in indicators in all age groups [en métropole]especially among those under 20.. “We passed the peak of BA.2, which was the second sub-variant of Omicron”assured epidemiologist Arnaud Fontanet, Wednesday, in “C to you”, on France 5. “We can hope for a month of May, until August, with a contained situation. We cannot completely eliminate the return of a new variant”he added.

Hospitalizations: expected return below 1,000 patients

For the first time since March, thanks to a 28% drop in one week, the rolling average for the number of new hospitalized patients should be less than a thousand in the coming hours. Since the beginning of December, France has lived almost permanently above this bar, as had already been the case between October 2020 and May 2021.

Wednesday, 23 000 Covid-19 positive people were hospitalized, including 1,465 in intensive care and intensive care. The number of patients in these critical services has not been so low since November. For comparison, there were almost 4,000 at the peak of the fifth wave in January.

“We are almost all immune to this virus”analyzes the virologist Bruno Lina in The Dispatch. “In many cases, infected people describe much less serious and worrying forms of illness than what we could see before.”

Deaths in hospital: soon less than 100 deaths per day?

Since December, the curve of daily deaths of patients with Covid-19 has never fallen permanently below the 100 mark. After an 18% decline in one week, this could finally be the case in the coming days – with a little ahead of 2021, when it had to wait until June 3 to achieve this. In total, the number of victims identified in France since the start of the epidemic, in hospital or elsewhere, amounts to 146,376.