- Over the months of the coronavirus epidemic, Professor Didier Raoult has split several analyzes on the likely evolution of the pandemic.
- From the number of deaths to the mortality rate, including the possibility of a second wave or the seasonality of the virus, the controversial director of the IHU in Marseille has examined various aspects of the situation.
- Before Didier Raoult's hearing before the commission of inquiry into the coronavirus epidemic, 20 Minutes returns to these claims, to see if they have been verified.
Didier Raoult is the first to repeat it: he is not a "diviner". This did not prevent the controversial infectious disease specialist and director of the IHU Méditerranée Infection from formulating many hypotheses, over the months, about the likely evolution of the Covid-19 epidemic, with sometimes with much insurance.
Did Professor Raoult get it right? 20 Minutes returns, before his hearing before the commission of inquiry on the epidemic of coronavirus, on two of the most striking analyzes of the one who affirmed, on the antenna of BFMTV, on June 3: "When I say something, what interests me is being able to hear it ten years later - it will become more and more difficult over time - and not being ashamed of what I said. What I say day to day or what I think day to day does not affect me […], what interests me is to be in agreement with myself ten years later. "
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"The death rate, now around 2%, will probably decrease" and "We will see if [the coronavirus] can kill 10,000 [people], but that would surprise me"
At the very beginning of February, two weeks before a first Covid-19 death was recorded in France, and just over a month from the active circulation of the virus on French territory, Didier Raoult wanted to be reassuring about the mortality rate of the virus, according to its first media appearances.
He said in particular, in response to a question from the Sunday Journal on the possible exaggeration of the government around the danger of the coronavirus: "This virus is not so bad, it is not a blind murderer. The mortality rate, estimated today at around 2%, that is to say equivalent to that of all viral pneumonias present in the hospital, will probably decrease once the cases which have not given symptoms will be taken into account. While acknowledging in the process: "Yes, popes will probably die from pneumonia because of this new virus, as in China."
A month and a half later, in the columns of La Provence , Didier Raoult was skeptical about the future number of deaths caused by the epidemic: “10,000 dead is a lot. But here, we are less than 500. We will see if we can kill 10,000, but that would surprise me ».
To check whether Didier Raoult had rightly seen it or not, we must first differentiate between the mortality rate (the number of coronavirus deaths compared to the population of a country) and the fatality rate (the number of death of the coronavirus compared to the number of cases tested, known as the " case fatality rate " or CFR in English). If Didier Raoult spoke well in the JDD of "mortality rate, he was actually referring to the fatality rate - like many media at the time wrongly using the first expression to designate the second scenario.
The real fatality rate has decreased (but there have been more than 10,000 deaths in France)
In early February, the coronavirus fatality rate in the world was indeed estimated between 2% and 3% by the scientific community, with an estimate of just over 200 deaths per 10,000 cases. If screening was rare during this period, the more tests are performed, the more the number of cases increases while the fatality rate logically decreases. In early February, it would have dropped from 3% to 0.3% or 0.4% once compared to the actual number of cases in the world according to a modeling.
A month later, the CFR rate of Covid-19 was 3.4% according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which noted: "Globally, approximately 3.4% of people victims [of Covid-19] whose cases have been notified have died. By comparison, seasonal flu usually kills less than 1% of those infected ... "And as of June 23, with 469,159 deaths in 8.9 million cases, the global fatality rate for coronavirus is about 5%.
Reported across France to date, with the latest data available on June 23 - 154,567 cases for 29,571 deaths - the national fatality rate is 19%. A similar percentage to that observed in May. However, the WHO bases its figures on the cases tested positively, without taking into account people with little or no symptoms that Didier Raoult mentioned to explain the future drop in the percentage. By including these, again thanks to modeling, we obtain the real lethality rate (or IFR). This is what the Pasteur Institute did, resulting, in a study published in mid-May, at an IFR rate of 0.7% for France.
“0.7% is a rate that corresponds to a very severe pandemic scenario. In a scenario where we do nothing, 50% of the population could be infected. And if we apply a rate of 0.7%, that makes hundreds of thousands of deaths ", explained the epidemiologist Simon Cauchemez of the Pasteur Institute to our colleagues from Checknews, at the end of May, recalling the clear superiority of this rate compared to the 2009 H1N1 flu, whose fatality was 0.02%.
If Didier Raoult was therefore right to anticipate a drop in the fatality rate, he was too optimistic about the total number of deaths of the Covid-19 in France, this one having largely crossed the 10,000 death mark. An error recognized by the interested party in Paris Match at the beginning of May: "Yes, I said that I doubted that there would be more than 10,000 dead. I should have said, "I didn't think there would be that many." "
" It is possible that within a month there are no more cases at all in most temperate countries "and a second wave that would report " in [the] fantasy, science fiction "
At the end of April, in his weekly update on YouTube, Didier Raoult said: "I do not predict the future, but if things continue like this, we have the impression that what was one of the possibilities of this illness, that is to say a seasonal illness, is being realized. It is possible that within a month, there will be no more cases at all in most temperate countries. ”
A week later, in a video called "Are we really risking a second wave?" ", He added:" [The Covid-19 curve] is a bell curve, the typical curve for epidemics. The rebound story is a fantasy that was invented from the Spanish flu. […] Epidemics have disappeared over time long before we can afford to contain them. They begin, accelerate, culminate, [...] and they decrease and they disappear, we do not know why. "
Finally, in what remains his most publicized statement on the subject, during an interview on BFMTV made at the same period (from 39'41 below) Didier Raoult was more than skeptical about the possibility of a second wave of the epidemic: "I don't know where it came from again, it's a fantasy ... We can imagine everything, we can have imagination on everything, but it's science fiction. […] There are no respiratory infections in which there are second waves, so I don't see why there would be any for that one. ” While acknowledging, during the same interview (at 20'25) have sometimes "analyzed things too quickly, like everyone else" during the epidemic.
In February, he also reminded 20 Minutes , in response to a statement by Trump about the possible disappearance of the virus in the spring, a recurring characteristic for this type of virus: "Almost all respiratory viruses have a seasonality, so we can imagine that this is the case with coronavirus. In any case, it is reasonable to consider it for a respiratory illness.
At the end of May, knowledge about the seasonality of Covid-19 had not changed much, as noted by the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm): "Our knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 remains for the still too fragmented a moment to pronounce with certainty on its seasonality, but all the work reminds of the importance of preventive measures. However, the institution underlined the results of a study suggesting "that this virus is capable of causing epidemics at any time of the year in the absence of measures of social distancing or lasting immunity, but that the autumn and winter are more favorable seasons for a significant increase in the number of cases. "
On the first point, Didier Raoult was too optimistic: there were still many cases of coronavirus in several temperate countries at the end of May and this is still the case today. But if the number of clusters has increased in France in recent days, that China has adopted containment measures to stem a worrying rise in contamination and that Germany has reconfigured locally to cope with a significant increase in the rate Reproduction of the virus, however, is not a question - at this stage - of a second wave, according to his analysis of such a scenario.
If Didier Raoult was quite categorical on the non-possibility of a second wave during his passage on BFMTV in April, he also defends himself from having categorically excluded this possibility, as he notably reminded L 'Express at the end of May: "I never said that there would be no second wave. I recalled that, for the moment, this has never happened. It's like asking me if you should play Euromillions. I advise against it, but ultimately there are some who win. Everything is possible. A second wave cannot be excluded ”.
And he himself qualified his estimates, in his weekly YouTube point on June 16 (from 11'40 below): "No one is able to predict the future. There may be a new epidemic peak during the winter-spring season, it may disappear, it will depend on the distribution in the inter-tropical zone and on the fact that there will be people who will be chronic carriers ”.
While indicating, in this video and more recently in Le Parisien , that New Zealand had to be "watched" very closely to be able to anticipate the occurrence of a possible new peak in the epidemic: "It is a temperate country, climatically close to ours. This weekend, we entered the summer, them, in the winter. As we do for influenza, we will try to deduce what can happen by looking at how the virus behaves there. There is a mirror effect. If the number of cases soars there, it will be feared in the fall that the epidemic will return to France. "
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