The latest news concerning the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus epidemic is rather encouraging: to date, less than 12,000 patients with Covid-19 are hospitalized in France (among them: less than 2,000 in intensive care units) , the disease has caused “only” 50 deaths per day for about a week, and the number of contaminations has fallen below the fateful 5000 mark. In short: things are better.
Nevertheless: according to an estimate published by our colleagues from the World this Friday, June 18, 2021, the current situation could have been even better if President Emmanuel Macron had listened to the recommendations of scientists at the start of 2021.
“These two months of delay had a cost”
“If the government had confined the French at the beginning of February, as scientists advised it, and not at the beginning of April (…) According to our estimates, around 14,600 deaths, 112,000 hospitalizations, including 28,000 in intensive care, and 160,000 cases of long Covid could have been avoided.” explain the journalists, who base their figures on “the evolution curves of the three main epidemiological indicators (death, resuscitation, hospitalizations) (…) shifted by two months upstream.“
Figures confirmed by researchers from the Infectious Diseases and Vectors, Genetic Ecology, Evolution and Control (Mivegec) unit in Montpellier, which gives a range of between 9,000 and 20,000 preventable deaths.
“In January, we all expected the government to take advantage of the winter holidays to confine, to do precisely what we did two months later, during the spring holidaysremarks Pascal Crépey, epidemiologist at the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health in Rennes, under whose control the statistical estimates of the World have been executed. These two months of delay had a cost.“
We recall that at the end of January 2021, unconfined France was an exception in Europe: Ireland had reconfigured its population from December 30, 2020, the United Kingdom from January 4, 2021 and Portugal, January 15, 2021 .
Source : The world
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