He’s no longer making headlines, but he’s still there. Covid is experiencing a perceptible rebound in France, but so far moderate, as the school holidays approach.
More than four years after the start of the pandemic, several signals of increasing circulation are converging, as in other European countries. In hospitals or in community medicine, “recourses for suspected Covid 19 have continued to increase for eight weeks”, even if they still remain modest, observed Public Health France on Wednesday.
An “increasingly marked” increase, both for visits to emergencies (+52% over one week) and to SOS Médecins (+51%, with 1,507 procedures from June 3 to 10). Wastewater, where the presence of Sars-CoV-2 is monitored in 12 stations, also shows a clear progression in viral circulation over the past month.
Humanitarian decline
“The rise was predictable,” Mircea Sofonea, epidemiologist at the University of Montpellier and Nîmes University Hospital, told AFP. The cause: “an immune decline” of the population, but also “an immune escape” of the new sub-variants of the virus, all members of the Omicron JN.1 lineage, according to this expert. “There is no evidence to our knowledge that this new wave causes a greater health impact than the two previous ones,” according to Mircea Sofonea.
Caution before the Games
Although, since May 2023, the World Health Organization no longer considers the pandemic a global health emergency, it regularly reminds that SARS-CoV-2 “continues to circulate and evolve”. The risk remains of a more dangerous variant.
“The evolution of Omicron since the end of 2021 shows us to what extent the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 is far from linear: older lineages resurface thanks to a significant evolutionary leap, then diversify , recombine,” noted the epidemiologist.
If vaccines lose their effectiveness against infections over time, they remain very protective against serious forms, insist the health authorities. A new campaign, targeting those over 80 and the most vulnerable, began in mid-April in France.
And caution remains in order for the Olympic Games. Because the cocktail of “mixing, promiscuity, convivial context favors the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, like other respiratory viruses”, recalled Mircea Sofonea.