Calls for the return of mask wearing are beginning to emerge in the face of the progression of the new variant of Covid Eris.
THE covid does not take vacations and is talked about again in the heart of summer. Coming out of the majority of minds after more than three years of pandemic and several waves, the SARS-Cov-2 virus was indeed recently recalled to the (bad) memory of some French people, especially in New Aquitaine in the wake of the Bayonne celebrations where the number of cases exploded.
To EMERGENCIES, the passages for suspicion of Covid thus increased by 31% the week from July 31 to August 6 compared to the previous one, concerning 920 patients, according to Public Health France. On the SOS Médecins side, medical procedures for suspected Covid-19 jumped 84% in one week, to more than 1,500 procedures at the start of August.
It’s here EG.5 version of the virus, dubbed Eris by some experts, which is currently the most scrutinized. In the same way as summer gatherings and the drop in immunity, the latter could carry the epidemic rebound in France, and elsewhere in the world. The world organization also added it in mid-July to its list of strains under surveillance.
New Eris variant ‘potentially more capable of causing a big wave’ this fall
In this context, scientists call on the population to put the mask back onas noted by DailyMirror. “It seems like it’s time to hide again”, wrote Dr Trisha Greenhalgh, an expert in primary health care at the University of Oxford, on the social network X (ex-Twitter). A recommendation shared by British professor Christina Pagel who declared that this new variant is “potentially more capable of causing a big wave“ this autumn. Calls for a return to mask-wearing have also emerged in the United States in recent days.
However, for the time being, there is no indication that the severity of EG.5 is greater than the other variants, nor that it is able to escape the immunity acquired by a previous contamination or by the vaccine.