LIVE – Gabriel Attal: “The Omicron variant reshuffles the cards”

Invited this Tuesday on the France Info set this Tuesday, Benjamin Davido, infectious disease specialist at Raymond-Poincaré hospital and Covid-19 referent doctor at Garches hospital (Hauts-de-Seine), said he was “not so much” have sufficient elements to assert that Omicron is “less demanding” than its Delta counterpart.

This is because the Omicron variant is above all very contagious, mechanically inducing an increased risk of hospitalizations and death.

“If it is twice as contagious as each variant was consecutively and it is 30% less lethal, the account is not there: you will have more deaths”, analyzes Benjamin Davido

Especially since contaminations can be rapid and lead to very high peaks of new cases, and thus lead to great difficulties in health management and significant hospital overload, adds the infectious disease specialist.

Invited this Tuesday on the France Info set this Tuesday, Benjamin Davido, infectious disease specialist at Raymond-Poincaré hospital and Covid-19 referent doctor at Garches hospital (Hauts-de-Seine), was skeptical about the temporality of the vaccination of children, for which the High Authority of Health gave the green light Monday for those aged 5 to 11 years.

“We are late on this issue. We now know: it takes three doses of vaccine to fully cope with Omicron. Children will therefore be fully immunized by the end of March,” he insists. he.

In fact, the rising curve of cases of contamination could not feel the effect of this new phase of the vaccine strategy and continue to progress at first.

The infectious disease specialist suggests waiting for a new vaccine that is more effective against the Omicron variant, and in particular active against its high contagiousness. “The most important thing is to block transmission,” says the doctor.

The government’s goal of vaccinating 20 million French people with a booster dose by Christmas should be reached on Tuesday, according to Health Minister Olivier Véran. 19,806,232 injections were performed Monday evening.

“Today we will reach 20 million recalls. Thank you to all those who, mobilized as ever, allow us to protect ourselves against the delta and omicron variants,” he wrote on Twitter. “We continue, we amplify, we will get there, together!”

Asked about the possibility of more restrictive restrictive measures, Gabriel Attal did not exclude the possibility of having recourse to them.

“If we see that there is a very strong resumption of the epidemic linked to the Omicron variant and a risk, obviously we can go beyond,” said the government spokesperson.

According to him, the country is preparing to live very complicated weeks on the epidemic front.

“We are entering a period of strong turbulence with the Omicron variant which results, as we see in the United Kingdom, by a deluge of contaminations. We must be very careful,” warned the government spokesperson.

Guest of the 4 Truths on France 2, government spokesman Garbiel Attal expressed the executive’s concern about the looming Omicron wave.

“The Omicron variant is reshuffling the cards. It is much more contagious than anything we have known. Every 2 to 3 days, the cases of Omicron double”, hammered the spokesman of the government, qualifying the progression of the variant of “foudroyante”.

The Doctolib site recorded a sharp increase in appointments for first-time injections on Monday, with 26,153 vaccination appointments for a first dose taken with Doctolib. Since the beginning of December, this figure has fluctuated between 10 and 15,000.

This increase comes after the government’s announcement to transform the current health pass into a vaccination pass.

Around 30,000 first-time injections were performed in France each day this month.

Critical care services are welcoming more than 3,000 patients with Covid-19 for the first time since May, according to figures released Monday by Public Health France.

These services, where the most serious cases are treated, have 3,025 patients, against 2,936 the day before. They recorded 340 admissions in 24 hours. France has 15,918 Covid-19 patients hospitalized in total, nearly 400 more than the day before. Public Health France has identified nearly 1,500 new hospitalizations in 24 hours.

The number of new cases was 15,075 in 24 hours, but that number is traditionally low on Monday. Over the past seven days, the average has climbed to 52,885 daily cases. The number of deaths since the start of the epidemic has reached 121,493.