Can the third confinement be delayed or must it be launched this week?
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Jeanne Accorsini / SIPA
France has more than 3,000 patients in intensive care due to the coronavirus, and an average of 20,000 cases per day ... Figures, constantly increasing, which make a third confinement more and more essential.
Faced with this deadline, the government seems to want to delay and wait until the last moment to decide to confine France again.
Can we really play for time in the face of the coronavirus epidemic?
Will contain, will not confine?
While the word is on everyone's lips, the executive seems to be taking its time to decide, even if it means letting the numbers of the Covid-19 epidemic reach new heights.
This Monday, France again had more than 3,000 patients in intensive care due to the coronavirus.
To be below this symbolic number was however one of the two conditions set by Emmanuel Macron to deconfin France on December 15.
The second goal of 5,000 cases per day or less has never been met.
Currently, an average of 20,000 people test positive for coronavirus every day over the past seven days.
Faced with increasingly alarming and constantly increasing figures (10% more positive cases this week compared to the previous one), many scientists are calling for a national (re) reconfinement.
An exponential disease
Far from excluding this hypothesis, the executive nevertheless seems to be playing the clock.
While the
Journal du Dimanche
thought to exclusively announce a reconfinement this week, the government denies it half-heartedly, indicating that nothing has been decided yet and that Emmanuel Macron does not intend to speak in the coming days.
The president of the scientific council, Jean-François Delfraissy, for his part declared in
Liberation on
Tuesday that the confinement "is not close to a week".
A quote that strangles Michaël Rochoy, epidemiology researcher, worried about the exponential curves of the coronavirus.
The number of cases, hospitalizations, intensive care admissions and deaths is not increasing week after week in a linear fashion, but more and more quickly.
The doctor recalls that around October 15, France also had 20,000 cases per day.
They were 56,000 on November 3, two and a half weeks later.
And again, this peak decreased thanks to the school holidays from October 17.
However, the next school holidays not starting in ten days, and concerning only part of the territory, “the peak should this time rise much higher.
Everything announces a third wave more violent and murderous than the second.
"
Delayed confinement, extended confinement
Wouldn't the idea be precisely to delay until the next vacation and let them take effect in addition to confinement?
No doubt according to Michaël Rochoy, even if the strategy does not seem clever to him.
"We are at 400 deaths per day, to wait a week is to say that 3,000 deaths do not count", he blows.
Before recalling Emmanuel Macron's maxim of last March: "If we are really at war, we must stop half-measures or wait for the simplest situation.
We must act hard and fast.
"
For epidemiologist Antoine Flalhault, each week of waiting before a new confinement will only increase the duration of it.
Currently at 20,000 cases per day, with an R (virus reproduction rate) of containment that we can hope for at 0.7 with strict containment, "each week, we will halve the number of new daily infections, we will be therefore to 5,000 cases per day in fifteen days.
If we lose a week and end up with 30,000 cases per day, then it will take more time to regain control because we will start from higher.
"
The risk and the expectation of an uncontrollable situation
However, the current situation seems difficult to sustain.
France has several hundred deaths a day due to the coronavirus, hospitalizations and resuscitations have been increasing for several weeks, and even assuming that they do not increase any more, France would find itself on a very high plateau.
A ridge line that Germany had experienced in December, before reconfiguring in the face of a new outbreak of the epidemic.
An extremely uncomfortable situation, as Antoine Flahault explains: “France finds itself in a particularly dangerous position, because it is close to a shift towards a situation of uncontrollable exponential growth and saturation of its hospitals.
"
The whole question is there for Michaël Rochoy: why wait for the situation to get out of hand to act?
“The sooner and faster we confine, the less costly the confinement is, in time, in social terms, in economics, in deaths.
France always waits until the last moment to confine, which creates very long confinements like the first, or inefficient to really stop the epidemic, such as the second, ”he laments.
The opportunity to finally change the model?
And if precisely, this third confinement that hangs in our face, as in all of Europe, was the opportunity to change tears in terms of the strategy against the coronavirus?
Noting the impossibility of living with Covid-19 and the wear and tear of stop-and-go modes, the Old Continent could draw inspiration from the Asian model: we do not live with the coronavirus, we do not give it the place of spread.
At the slightest increase in cases, countries massively confine entire districts or close all closed places, to be sure that the epidemic never takes off.
At a time when Germany, England or Ireland are already reconfining themselves and Spain and Portugal are experiencing a massive outbreak of cases, Antoine Flahault believes that this creates "a window of opportunity for the whole country. Europe, because it may be the time to regain control in a coordinated way over the pandemic in the continent and not to let the virus circulate there at such a level of intensity.
"Even if it means undergoing a third long confinement, you might as well arrange for it to be the last.
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