The Institut Pasteur unveiled its latest projections for next summer on Monday, and they are optimistic.
If the decline continues, and if the French do not relax too much in the coming weeks, then the summer holidays could well be beautiful.
For more than a year, the Covid has poisoned the lives of French people, and the pandemic has caused the death of more than 108,000 people.
But the current period is one of optimism.
The Institut Pasteur updated its projections for the coming summer on Monday, and there is every reason to believe that the French will be able to spend a serene summer vacation.
Even if it will obviously not be necessary to relax too much.
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"The coronavirus is most likely subject to seasonality"
For now, all signals are green.
The decline of the epidemic even goes beyond the hopes of specialists.
In just over a month, the number of daily hospitalizations has increased from nearly 2,000 to 700. "The coronavirus is very likely to be seasonally", confides an epidemiologist.
"And at the moment, that is very favorable to us".
Another figure: a month ago, approximately 30,000 cases were detected per day.
Today, we are around 12,000 cases daily on average over a week.
"We are really happy to see this number of cases decline so quickly", reacts on Europe 1 Arnaud Fontanet, epidemiologist at the Pasteur Institute.
"And the more we manage to reduce this number of cases until mid-June, the better positioned we will be to spend a quiet summer."
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Hold "another three weeks"
But we must not relax.
"Depending on whether the epidemic starts again from May 19, date of the first reopening which has just taken place, or only after June 9, which therefore corresponds to the second stage of reopening, we see that we are faced with two scenarios totally different ", continues the doctor.
"What these projections tell us is that whether or not we stick around for another three more weeks, it can really have a very different summer."
If Arnaud Fontanet shows such caution, it is because there are still uncertainties.
"The behavior of the French may change and not be the same as last summer. This is something that we cannot fully anticipate. Then there is the climate too, which could be different from the one we knew last summer, "lists the epidemiologist.
"And then there is the speed with which the vaccination will continue. We will still enter a period quite close to the moment when we could start to have a little more difficulty in finding candidates. And finally, there is always the threat of variants. "
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The target of 5,000 cases per day
Nevertheless, a symbolic bar is approaching, that of the 5,000 new cases detected per day. It could be reached in mid-June, and that would change everything. "This is a level from which what is called testing, alerting, protecting, therefore contact tracing, case isolation, quarantine, becomes much easier," says Arnaud Fontenet. This will allow that time to have much better control over the rest. "
Finally, the last very encouraging signal concerns the vaccination campaign, which is progressing very strongly. We went from 350,000 to 500,000 doses administered each day on average. By July 1, more than one in two people will have received at least one injection. With the arrival of the health pass, the French have understood it well, if they want to spend a quiet summer, without or almost Covid, that also goes, and even first, through vaccination.