Paris (AFP)

Strengthening of barrier gestures, negative test requested at the borders: the government is taking new measures to prevent a new epidemic wave of Covid-19, made more dangerous by its variants, but does not rule out a third confinement in less than a year.

We must "give a chance to work" to the curfew advanced at 6:00 p.m., summed up Thursday evening the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, on TF1, while the number of positive cases stabilized last week, at 128,551 .

"The hypothesis of containment is more and more likely," a government source told AFP on Friday.

"We are in fact in the last chance", added on France Inter Arnaud Fontanet, epidemiologist at the Pasteur Institute and member of the scientific council which guides the choices of the executive.

- Goodbye homemade masks -

Faced with the threat of this 202012/01 VOC variant which has overwhelmed the hospital system in the United Kingdom, France will require European travelers to have a negative PCR test carried out within 72 hours before their arrival.

This obligation, which comes into force on Sunday at 00:00, will not apply to frontier workers or land transport.

After a recommendation from the High Council of Public Health (HCSP), the government is now also calling on the population to ban certain fabric masks, including homemade ones, deemed not sufficiently filtering, a measure whose application will however be difficult to control.

Another change, the necessary safety distance, below which one can be considered in case of contact when not wearing a mask, will drop from one to two meters.

This will have consequences in particular in the tracing of cases by Health Insurance.

Will these measures be enough?

"If it is yes we can still hold out, if we see (that the English variant) continues to progress, it will unfortunately be necessary to quickly do what the English and the Irish did", that is to say strict confinement, warned Arnaud Fontanet.

He recalls that the mask, hand hygiene, surface cleaning and ventilation are "absolutely essential".

But it is also the vaccines that will help get out of the crisis.

Thursday evening, Olivier Véran again defended the results of the government on its vaccination campaign, which has suffered many criticisms, first for its slowness, now for a supposed lack of transparency on the number of doses arriving in the hundreds of centers installed.

According to the latest count from the Ministry of Health, 823,567 people (residents in nursing homes, over 75 years in the city, health professionals or patients with certain pathologies) had received the first injection Thursday evening, against 480,000 three days earlier.

- Last waterfall -

On TF1, Olivier Véran has displayed a very ambitious strategy, with 70 million vaccinated at the end of August, ie the entire French population.

Earlier, he had been much more cautious before the Senate Law Committee, predicting that "even with the best organization and all the supplies that would arrive on time, we could not have vaccinated all audiences. fragile by summer ", or 25 to 30 million people.

In the immediate future, Arnaud Fontanet also calls for an acceleration of the pace of surveys measuring the spread of variants.

After an initial mapping last week, according to which 1 to 2% of Covid cases are from the English variant, Public Health France said it hoped for new results, "if possible next week".

While Portugal, faced with an outbreak of contaminations, has closed its schools, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer repeated Friday on RTL that the February holidays would not be extended.

But in a letter sent Thursday evening to teachers, he announced that the first specialty tests of the new baccalaureate, scheduled for March, would be canceled in favor of continuous assessment.

If the epidemic situation seems to have stabilized, that of hospitals remains tense.

Since this week, the number of admissions of patients with the virus has risen above 10,000 over the last seven days, for a total of inpatients of 25,699, including 2,866 in intensive care, figures which are slowly increasing.

France still counted 358 deaths of Covid-19 patients in hospital on Thursday, a total of 71,998 deaths since the start of the epidemic.

In the list of celebrities swept away by this disease, the name of the famous stuntman Rémy Julienne, who died at the age of 90, has been added.

© 2021 AFP