Paris (AFP)

No new confinement immediately.

Despite a fragile epidemic situation and an increase in hospital admissions, the executive wants to give itself time to observe the results of the curfew at 6 p.m. before adding a notch to health restrictions.

"To my knowledge and on the basis of the data at our disposal, at this stage there is no reason to decide on confinement", declared on RMC / BFMTV the Minister of Industry, Agnès Pannier-Runacher.

While a third confinement this week was presented as a serious avenue, the Elysee now prefers to wait a few days to fully measure the effect of the curfew at 6 p.m. on the entire national territory, which entered into force on January 16 .

Under these conditions, the Head of State does not plan to speak at the end of the health defense council scheduled for Wednesday.

"We are not in an extreme emergency. We are not close to a week away," judges the president of the scientific council, who guides the government's choices, Jean-François Delfraissy, in an interview with Liberation.

On Sunday, the immunologist was more alarmist, saying that there is an emergency "and that" it will probably be necessary to go towards a containment ".

"France will not be an island apart in the rest of Europe" in the face of the variants of Covid-19, more contagious and which raise fears of an epidemic explosion, he also warned on Monday, during an intervention by videoconference at the opening of the European bioethics forum in Strasbourg.

- More than 3,000 patients in shifts -

The Covid-19 epidemic is still actively circulating.

From Monday to Friday, between 22,000 and 30,000 people tested positive, up slightly from the previous week, according to data from Public Health France.

At the national level, the incidence rate (positive cases per 100,000 inhabitants over seven days) started to rise again, from 190 to 208 in one week.

The indicators of hospital pressure and mortality are also slowly deteriorating.

France thus counted 449 deaths in hospital on Monday (against 404 a week earlier) and the bar of 3,000 Covid-19 patients treated in the intensive care units was again exceeded on the same day (3,031), while this figure had stabilized around 2,600 at the end of December-beginning of January.

The rate of hospitalizations is more clearly on the rise, reaching a total of 26,888 hospitalized patients on Monday.

If strict confinement is not decided immediately, Professor Delfraissy judges "clear that the school holidays can be seen as an opportunity since they are accompanied by the closure of schools".

"We can imagine merging all the zones into one, deciding to close the schools for three weeks instead of two, and to confine this period", he explains in Liberation, while warning that he is is a "political decision".

On the vaccination front, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, announced on Tuesday that the delay between the two doses of the Pfizer vaccine will be maintained at "3 or 4 weeks", despite the opinions of two health authorities who estimated that 'it could be extended to six weeks to vaccinate more people.

A postponement would ultimately only have a "minor impact on the rate of vaccinations", he said.

An extension was far from achieving consensus among doctors, who are worried about a reduced effectiveness of vaccines.

The million injection mark was exceeded in France this weekend.

But for the scientific council, if vaccines constitute "a major hope for limiting the impact or even largely solving the Covid-19 pandemic", it is "not before the summer - autumn 2021".

© 2021 AFP