Benefiting from a favorable health situation, France has decided to lift a number of restrictive measures. The epidemiologist Yves Buisson returns for La Dépêche du Midi on the new perspectives which await the French in a context of improvement of the situation.
How do you view the health situation in France?
The health situation is becoming very favorable in France. Viral circulation has remained at a very low level in France for several weeks. It still exists, but it is at a level that is below the alert threshold. We are in very good conditions, insofar as the variants currently circulating do not present any short or medium term threats. Even if it is still possible to see new variants emerge, there is no risk, in the short term, of new epidemic outbreaks.
Will the end of the test obligation for contact cases have an impact on the monitoring of the health situation?
Hard to say. Epidemiological surveillance must be adapted to the epidemiological situation. I’m not saying that we have to stop this surveillance strategy, but let’s say that we are now moving towards a monitoring regime that resembles in all respects what we know for all transmissible respiratory diseases, like the flu or bronchiolitis. Moreover, these restrictive measures had not been applied for several months. Surveillance must therefore now be limited to cases of contamination that are detected in the country, hospitalizations and deaths: we must continue to sequence them and work with our European neighbors.
Should we stop being interested in contamination if the screening tests are much less numerous?
Screening tests were obviously an interesting indicator. But today we have a multitude of other indicators that will allow us to follow the evolution of the pandemic. And if an indicator today loses some of its reliability, other data will be there to compensate. What seems very important to me not to let go is the analysis of wastewater. This is something that is still somewhat new in France, and that we have not integrated into the national monitoring system.
France has also ended the test obligation for travelers from China: was this decision taken too soon?
I think we have here once more an adaptation to the epidemiological situation. Although we have relatively little direct information on the evolution of the health situation in China, we have a certain number of indirect consequences. It is thus believed that the epidemic peak in China has passed: the high-risk period was last December. We then had everything to fear, fearing the appearance of new variants which would have relaunched the epidemic in the world. But the variants that were detected during this epidemic wave were already known. It thus seems to us that the Chinese danger seems to be being averted.
In the end, what will life “with Covid-19” look like now?
It’s always a bit difficult to make predictions, but we know that globally, coronaviruses are seasonal viruses. The pandemic phase of Covid-19 knew no seasons. We can hope that we are moving towards an endemo-epidemic situation, during which the virus would have to accelerate its circulation in cold weather. However, Covid-19 has crossed the “species barrier” (the transmission of the virus from animals to humans, editor’s note) and is not regarding to disappear.
