Participation in the first round of municipal elections on March 15 would have "not contributed statistically" to the spread of the new coronavirus, according to a study by statisticians and epidemiologists published by Le Monde on Friday.
To carry out the study, the researchers compared the figures for participation in the first round at the departmental level and the progression of the coronavirus at the local level.
The opinion on the second round of municipal elections expected at the end of May
"We did not find a statistical effect of the level of participation in each department on subsequent hospitalizations for Covid-19, measured locally," says Jean-David Zeitoun of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology at Hôtel-Dieu in Paris. , study coordinator, on the daily website. "In other words, it is not because people went to vote more in a given department that the disease has spread more quickly in terms of hospitalizations," he said.
The national scientific committee must give an opinion next week to the government on the possibility or not of organizing the second ballot at the end of June. Several assessors and elected officials, often very involved in the electoral campaign, had been victims of the virus after the first round, which had fueled the controversy over the maintenance of voting in the midst of an epidemic. The poll of March 15 also ended in a surge of 18 points in abstention compared to the 2014 municipal elections.
Validation by the scientific community expected
However, "the difference in abstention, compared to 2014, could be of the same order in municipalities of the Grand-Est, very affected, as in regions of the West where the disease was still very rare", underlines Jérôme Fourquet, director of the Opinion department of the FIFG and co-author of this work. The study put online on the basis of MedRxiv prepublication "has not yet undergone peer review prior to any publication by a scientific journal," says Le Monde .
Asked about this work, the government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, recalled that the government will rely on the advice of the scientific council to decide on the holding of the second round. "We are also committed to the fact that there is a national consensus around this issue so that, basically, the situation we experienced in the first round is not repeated, where many agreed before and discovered themselves against afterwards, "she said on France 2 on Friday.
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