Hospitalizations should continue to increase at the beginning of July, but the horizon is clearing up and makes it possible to envisage an improvement.
The seventh wave of Covid continues to progress in France, and we now exceed a weekly average of 120,000 daily contaminations. While it is still difficult to know when the peak will occur, some early indicators point to an improvement in the situation during the month of July. But, in the short term, the situation should continue to deteriorate in hospitals already in great difficulty due to the lack of staff. “Since the start of the pandemic, we have made our models more complex by gradually adding new parameters describing vaccine and natural immunity.explains Simon Cauchemez, head of modeling teams at the Institut Pasteur. But we have reached such a high level of complexity that this model no longer works. We need to make a transition to slightly simpler models, which take into account a global situation, even if it means losing a little precision in the long term.”
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The scientist has just posted projections for the next few days on the Institut Pasteur website. They go until July 18 and count on some 1,700 daily admissions to the hospital on this horizon, against a thousand at the moment. In critical care, admissions would thus rise to around 160 per day, where they are currently around 100. “Beyond these figures, arguments allow us to be a little optimistic for the month of July, continues the scientist. The growth rates of hospitalizations and the number of cases are decreasing in certain regions, and in particular in Île-de-France.
“Comparable to the flu”
In other words, cases are increasing less quickly in recent days, which could foreshadow a decline. And this, especially since the school holidays begin this week, and that, for two years, this has always resulted in a drop in contamination. Moreover, even if nothing has been decided on this subject by the government, the wearing of masks is essential for a part of the population and should slow down, even modestly, contamination. “The last two waves were stopped without going through new constraintsadds Simon Cauchemez. We are no longer in a context where the number of cases is growing exponentially without encountering a limit. A significant portion of the population is immune. We know that immunity decreases over time, but there is not a total loss of the entire population.
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The epidemic no longer has the fuel to progress indefinitely throughout the population, as was the case during the first waves. The waves should therefore follow one another at the rate of this drop in immunity. The number of cases starting to rise again, either thanks to a new variant, or a more favorable weather or societal context, such as the start of the school year in September, then starting to fall again when enough people are infected. It now remains for scientists to anticipate the size of the waves. “We hope to succeed in developing a model comparable to that of the flu, explains Simon Cauchemez. We do not take into account past individual contaminations, or the different vaccine profiles, but we manage to predict the height of the waves.