Part of northern Italy has been under strict measures since this weekend due to the sudden increase in cases of Covid-19 coronavirus. Eleven cities, including ten of them in Lombardy, a region bordering Switzerland, were placed in quarantine following the adoption Saturday evening of a decree-law prohibiting the entries and the exits in these zones. Faced with the new count of 132 cases of contamination announced by the Civil Protection of a neighboring country, the French authorities are forced to accelerate the country's preparation for a possible multiplication of infections on the territory.
A "much greater" risk of epidemic
The Minister of Health Olivier Véran also said that France was preparing for the hypothesis of an "epidemic" and deemed the appearance of other cases "very likely" in an interview published Sunday in the newspaper Le Parisien . "The multiplication of households abroad, likely to spread to France, makes the risk of an epidemic much greater", confirmed Sunday to Europe 1 Arnaud Fontanet, the director of the department of global health at the Pasteur Institute. For him, the coronavirus epidemic is entering a new phase of "community transmission". "In the various homes, we can no longer connect patients with a trip to China or contact with an already affected person," he said.
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To limit the risk induced by this new phase, Olivier Véran said he requested an increase in the "number of laboratories equipped with diagnostic tests to reach a capacity of several thousand analyzes per day and throughout the territory, against 400 today ". "We are also continuing to wear mask equipment," he continued.
Containments for the moment localized
On the other hand, the minister does not plead "today" in any case "for large-scale containment measures in France", in contrast to China where 77,000 people are now infected and 2,442 deaths linked to the virus have been recorded. For the moment, France has indeed opted for a very localized confinement strategy for its nationals repatriated from China. Last episode to date: the confinement in a holiday village of Branville, in Calvados, of the thirty French returned to France by plane from Wuhan Friday. They will be monitored but had no symptoms when they arrived. Previously, 65 French people had already been confined in a holiday center located in Carry-le-Rouet near Marseille. They finally came out.
Only one person remains sick on the territory and is hospitalized in Lyon.