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from our correspondent
PARIS – “In the next 15 days there will be an increase, not massive but still an increase, of the number of serious cases ”, said the French Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, about the coronavirus epidemic. A worrying prognosis because in recent weeks France has registered a significant increase in infection, offset by the fact that so far many cases are asymptomatic or, in any case, are not serious and, therefore, hospitals and resuscitation rooms do not have difficulties. According to the minister’s announcement, things could change in two weeks, even if Véran added a positive forecast: “The measures we have taken soon should allow us to observe a slowdown in contagion.” Therefore, the authorities expect more serious cases, but with less rapid growth.
The numbers
The latest figure indicates 30,686 deaths and almost 9,000 new cases, about 1,500 more than the highest peak (7,578 new cases) recorded on March 31, when France respected a very strict blockade. But if hospital ICUs were on the brink of collapse at the end of March, today the health system does not seem to be in trouble. There are 4,671 inmates, significantly fewer than the more than 32,000 at the April 14 peak. At the same time, it should be noted that increase in hospital patients for the sixth consecutive day. “We are not in the same epidemic wave as last spring,” said Minister Véran. “The trend is much slower, but it has yet to alert us.”
The cause
The causes of the nearly 9,000 new cases are difficult to pinpoint with certainty. The health authorities raise some hypothesesMeanwhile, the tests are much more numerous, around a million in a week, compared to 30 thousand in March, and this obviously allows us to discover more people who have contracted the virus. But the fact is that in proportion, the rate of infected is increasing, from 1 percent on average at the end of June to 4 percent now. Why? Summer has favored trips, afternoons and meeting opportunities especially for the little ones, who in fact are much more numerous than in the past among those infected but asymptomatic or in any case with less severe forms of the disease. The case of the six Paris Saint-Germain champions who contracted the virus after a vacation in Ibiza can be considered emblematic of a more general trend. Then there is the difficulty linked to the strategy chosen by the government to combat the epidemic: test, identify, isolate. The idea is to do massive tests to identify positive cases as early as possible and isolate them to stop the infection. Only that only the first phase works, the test phase: so many that the laboratories cannot keep up to date and deliver the results even 10 days later, when those who are positive have had time to infect many other people. Minister Véran assured that soon the days of waiting for the results will be reduced to three or four.
September 5, 2020 (change September 5, 2020 | 18:30)
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