As every Wednesday morning, Emmanuel Macron will convene a new health defense council.

The executive should take the opportunity to talk about the end of the school holidays, the dates of which the government has unified.

Primary school students must return to class on April 26, middle school and high school students will be waiting for them on May 3.

Above all, the council will meet in a much more favorable health context.

The Covid-19 epidemic seems to be on a downward slope in France and if the current rhythm of vaccinations continues, the executive will be able to reach its goal of 20 million vaccinated with at least one dose by mid-May.

However, the situation is still too fragile to quickly relax the restrictions.

A territory-by-territory approach

For five days, "we have started a decrease in the epidemic" estimated Olivier Véran in an interview Monday with Telegram. The Minister of Health relies on a decrease in contamination: "we had risen to 40,000, today we are around 33,000 cases each day on average". Olivier Véran thus said he was open to the idea of ​​a territory-by-territory approach in the lifting of braking measures.

The reproduction rate (R0) of the virus, a key indicator corresponding to the number of people infected for a single patient, has "fallen below 0.9", for his part noted the epidemiologist Antoine Flahault on

RTL

, predicting that the decrease will increase in the days to come. This is especially the case in Ile-de-France, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Occitanie and Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Only the Creuse is a source of concern, with “clusters of new variants”. But, “it would be too premature to open the country today. France is on the right track and must do everything to maintain this course ”.

Emmanuel Macron has for the moment fixed for mid-May the reopening of the first terraces of bars and restaurants and cultural places, promising a strict sanitary protocol, but without fixing any sanitary condition, nor a maximum number of contaminations.

"This will be the subject of announcements in due course", according to the Minister of Health.

The problem of variants

Another subject is of concern to the authorities: variants, especially the one that is wreaking havoc in Brazil, but is still very little present in mainland France.

In an attempt to prevent their spread, the government on Saturday announced restrictions on travel from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Guyana, but also from South Africa.

Finally, on the vaccination front, the European Medicines Agency considered Tuesday that the benefits outweigh the risks for the Janssen and Astrazeneca vaccines.

Emmanuel Macron also congratulated himself during a “vaccines” meeting on Tuesday evening that vaccination “is accelerating” with more than 17 million doses already injected.

The important thing is "to know how one maintains this rhythm", in particular because of "difficulties to convince on AstraZeneca".

The subject should be on the table this Wednesday at the Elysee.

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