- Seven weeks after the first coronavirus-related death in France, mortality figures count fewer deaths in March 2020 than in March 2018.
- Fifty years ago, the Hong Kong flu killed 31,000 people between December 1969 and January 1970.
- The epidemic historian, Patrice Bourdelais, believes that confinement is "a political construction".
The statistics are sometimes misleading. Seven weeks after the first coronavirus-related death in France, mortality figures, released day by day by INSEE, count fewer deaths in March 2020 (57,400) than in March 2018 (58,600).
However, there were already 3,000 deaths linked to Covid-19 in hospitals on March 30. However, in March 2018, the seasonal flu was still virulent, unlike this year. And even compared to 2019 - a less morbid year than 2018 -, the number of deaths has just decreased in around half of the departments, despite the epidemic.
The 31,000 dead of the Hong Kong flu
"These figures show that, so far, this is not such an exceptional phenomenon of mortality, even if it is true that the natural course of the epidemic is disrupted by confinement," explains Patrice Bourdelais, historian of epidemics, which does not hesitate to compare the flu episodes that France regularly experiences. And to recall another episode of health crisis that went completely unnoticed in the collective unconscious in the winter of 1969-1970, fifty years ago: the Hong Kong flu killed 25,000 people in one month, and 31,000 between December and January. Around the world, one million people died.
"It's very disturbing because I was 20 years old and myself, I don't remember," says the historian at 20 Minutes . The media had spoken very little about it because the agenda was very busy with after 1968, social movements and the war in Biafra. "
"We crowded the dead in a room"
It was not until 2003 and the first SARS pandemic that two statisticians and epidemiologists, Antoine Flahault and Alain-Jacques Valleron, established the exact number of victims. “We crowded the dead in a room at the back of the intensive care unit. And we evacuated them when we could, during the day, in the evening, ”recounted in Liberation , in 2005, a former head of the infectious diseases department of the Nice hospital.
It was from 1970, after the Hong Kong episode, that the first public policies of vaccination against influenza began to be implemented. As today begins to strengthen the idea of working on an effective vaccine against several kinds of coronavirus. "Sensitivity to illness and death has changed," notes Patrice Bourdelais. But it is true that in the event of a health crisis, governments know that if it is well managed, they gain additional legitimacy. Otherwise, it soon backfires on them. ”
The containment strategy in question
According to the first projections, "the Covid-19 epidemic will have an increasing incidence in the statistics of mortality in April", specifies INSEE. Which, for the historian, questions the strategy of containment and its exit. "It is a political construction," he concludes. It is a system for managing epidemics established in the 14th century in the big Italian market towns, during the great plague. Faced with the panic created by the surprise extent of the gravity and mortality of the Covid-19, Italy has reproduced what it has known in its history. Once finished, the fear of rebound is present because it was what had happened in 1918 with the Spanish flu, then in 1957 with the Asian flu. And if the population has not developed antibodies… ”
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