Paris (AFP)

To counter the growing pressure in hospitals and avoid a third confinement, the instructions are multiplying on a strengthening of barrier gestures and a negative test for Covid-19 will be required from Sunday evening for entry into France, while the government is trying to reassure about vaccine delivery times.

It is from midnight Sunday that European travelers wishing to enter French territory will have to present a negative PCR test carried out 72 hours before.

These controls will take place in ports and airports mainly, currently some 62,000 people per week according to the Minister Delegate in charge of Transport Jean-Baptiste Djebbari.

Frontier workers and land transport will be exempt, the Elysee said this week.

Travelers from a country outside the European Union must already present a negative PCR test, and this since mid-January.

Faced with the English variant, much more contagious, the hypothesis of a third confinement is more and more evoked, even if the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, said this week wanting to "give a chance" to the curfew, fixed at 6:00 p.m. throughout France since January 16.

This English variant, present in France, is more contagious than previous mutations of the virus according to several studies.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson assured Friday that he also seemed more lethal (increased risk of death for the infected patient).

The World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that it has not yet learned of the new British elements and has not yet found that this variant was more lethal.

Health authorities scrutinize daily hospital data.

However, the figures show a steady increase in pressure on services.

On Friday, hospitals had 25,872 patients with Covid-19, including 2,902 in intensive care (the most serious cases).

A week earlier, they were 25,009 hospitalized patients, including 2,730 in "shifts".

Over the last seven days, nearly 11,000 patients have entered the hospital.

Even territories preserved until then are now affected: the French archipelago of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon (off the coast of Canada), which had only recorded 16 cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, makes faced since Friday with several contaminations which restrict the activity of its only hospital.

- Space the two doses -

The government is also trying to reassure the vaccination plan.

"We have new vaccines arriving, we have Pfizer which is increasing its production capacity," the Minister for Industry, Agnés Pannier-Runacher, said on Saturday on France Inter.

"We had indicated a million people vaccinated at the end of January, we are at 950,000 today. So this objective will be exceeded," said the minister.

"We also indicated 15 million people vaccinated in June. I am reasonably confident that this target will be exceeded."

The number of people vaccinated on Friday night was 963,139, according to official figures.

For its part, the High Authority for Health (HAS) described Saturday as "reasonable" the possibility of spacing the injection of the two doses of the Covid vaccines by six weeks (instead of three to four weeks currently), in order to protect the most vulnerable and face the "epidemic outbreak".

The extension of the injection time will make it possible to "accelerate the administration of the first dose to the most vulnerable people", that is, according to the projections of the HAS, at least 700,000 additional people "who would be protected by the vaccine" on the first month of application of this measure.

At the individual level, "the risk of loss of efficacy" of the vaccine between two doses "seems limited", indicates the HAS.

Regarding delivery delays, which the American Pfizer had reported for its vaccine developed with the German BioNTech, Ms. Pannier-Runacher assured Saturday that there had been "a slowdown last week, but which is caught up".

AstraZeneca (whose vaccine is awaiting the green light from European authorities, scheduled for late January) has warned of "a drop in yield" on a production site.

As for the masks, the instructions differ.

The government calls on the population to ban certain fabric masks, including homemade ones, deemed not to be sufficiently filtering.

The Academy of Medicine considers that this precautionary principle "lacks scientific proof" and that "such a change in the recommendations concerning a practice with which the whole population had managed to become familiar could lead to incomprehension" .

The WHO does not plan to change its recommendations on masks: those "made of fabric, non-surgical, can be used by all people under the age of 60 who do not have particular health problems".

fmp / cgu / tes

© 2021 AFP