Despite the hopes aroused by the start of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, the French are ending the year under the threat of possible re-containment.

However, it could be local, according to some elected officials.

Very worrying in places, the health situation motivates the holding of a defense council on Tuesday, December 29, announced the Elysee.

It is not yet known whether new measures will be decided there, but local elected officials already have their idea.  

In the Grand-Est, a particularly affected region, a local reconfinement is "a prospect today inescapable", judged the mayor (PS) of Nancy, Mathieu Klein, while leaving the state to fix it. perimeter, which could, according to him, be the region or the metropolis.

Nearly 12,000 daily cases

"Here in the Grand-Est, and particularly in Lorraine and Nancy (...) the circulation of the virus has accelerated sharply for two weeks, three weeks", he said on Franceinfo, saying " very worried "about the" very tense "situation in the hospital.

Over the last seven days, an average of 12,000 new daily cases of contamination have been detected in France, far from the target of 5,000 set by the government.

If we report the cases to the population, the east of the country is particularly affected, starting with the Grand-Est region, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté or the Alpes-Maritimes department.

"The belief that a severely affected region would not be so again has taken the lead in the wing", denounced Monday on Twitter the epidemiologist Dominique Costagliola.

Also the belief that a badly affected region would not be badly affected again has taken the lead.

- Costagliola (@DgCostagliola) December 28, 2020

 The Christmas effect         

Health professionals fear that this degradation is accentuated because of the mixing of the Christmas holidays.

If the curfew had been exceptionally lifted for December 24, it will be in effect for New Year's Eve on Thursday, and health authorities call on the responsibility of the French to limit their contacts.

But if the epidemic situation "were to worsen", a third confinement would not be excluded, warned the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran.

France has already been drastically confined from March to May, then under lighter conditions from October 30 to December 14, confinement having since been replaced by a night curfew. 

"In September, there was a kind of 'everything except confinement' which meant that the epidemic was allowed to rise for a while," said the director general of the AP-HP (Paris hospitals), Martin Hirsch, Monday, on Franceinfo.

"There, we say to the French 'the fate is in our hands': either we make the plateau fall again and in this case, there will be no need to re-limit. Either the plateau goes up and it will perhaps be necessary to do so rather than waiting until we have returned to situations of tension that are difficult to bear. "

The hope of the vaccine   

What to worry about an economic sector already brought to its knees by the previous measures.

The Confederation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (CPME) also called on Sunday to "not trivialize confinement": it "must be the last end to put an end to an uncontrollable situation, and not a simple hypothesis among other".

In this generally gloomy picture, the start of vaccination in France and Europe on Sunday brought a touch of hope.

The authorities hope that it will put an end to the epidemic during 2021. After the kick-off in two hospitals for the elderly in Sevran, then Dijon, the vaccination campaign continues, Monday, in a nursing home in Indre- et-Loire and another in Lille.

Initially, only residents of these establishments for seniors are concerned.

"For the elderly, the benefit is so great that, very quickly, membership will be done little by little," predicted the president of the High Authority for Health (HAS), Dominique Le Guludec, on France Inter.

"There are no severe side effects", and "therefore the benefit will be apparent very quickly", she added.

For its part, the health agency Public Health France announced the establishment of "monitoring indicators" to assess the proportion of people vaccinated and the effectiveness of the vaccine.

With AFP

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