A study carried out jointly by researchers from the university and the Bordeaux University Hospital, with Inserm and Inria, estimates the effectiveness of the health measures applied during confinement in March 2020.
How many lives have been saved thanks to confinement? How many people would have been saved if it had been implemented sooner? Did the vaccine arrive on time, was it effective? It is to these questions, and many others, that a study whose results are published in the journal Epidemics of this month of March 2024, tries to provide answers.
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What is the principle of the study?
Carried out in collaboration with Inserm, Inria, and researchers and the Bordeaux University Hospital, the study applies a mathematical model to French public health data to measure the health impact of different scenarios (containment established earlier, or not at all; no curfew; faster vaccines…) in terms of number of deaths or people hospitalized.
The study focuses on the period between March 2020, the start of confinement, and October 2021, i.e. a few months after the end of restrictive measures and the first vaccination campaign. As a result, the measures were all the more effective as they were restrictive.
For what results?
According to researchers, the first confinement would have reduced the transmission of the virus by 84%. Figures which coincide with those of several other similar studies, notably carried out by the WHO.
The 8:00 p.m. curfew would have reduced transmission by 48%. This is much worse than in a scenario at 6:00 p.m. (-68%). But it is much more effective than closing schools, which would have only caused a 15% drop in transmissions.
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Vaccination, too, has proven to be very valuable, according to the researchers. Starting with Rodolphe Thiébaut, professor of Public Health at the Bordeaux Population Health1 research center and head of the study. He explains that according to the mathematical modeling they applied, the scenario of an absence of vaccines would have involved 159,000 more deaths in France – compared to 116,000 according to official figures – and 1.48 million additional hospitalizations, i.e. three times more than what the country experienced.
What conclusions can be drawn ?
On the contrary, a vaccine arriving earlier, that is to say after a long quarter rather than almost a year after the start of the pandemic, could have avoided more than 70,000 deaths. Similarly, a lockdown applied even a week earlier could have saved 20,000 additional lives.
For the Bordeaux researcher, the results of these simulations should help decision-makers make the right choices and better anticipate the measures to take in the event of a new pandemic. “The start of an epidemic is exponential, (…) these results can contribute to rapid decision-making in the context of epidemic resurgences,” believes Rodolphe Thiébaut.