2024-07-06 04:30:01
October 9, 2023, Hancy vaccination center in Nice.
What if we get sicker since the Covid-19 pandemic? Influenza, bronchiolitis, but also measles, tuberculosis and polio: the epidemic of infectious diseases has increased in France and around the world over the past two years. The latest alarm so far is that whooping cough, a bacterial infection that causes severe coughing, has been on the rise across Europe since the start of the year.
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This leads to the conclusion that Covid-19 has made the world’s population more susceptible to infectious diseases over the course of more than three years of the pandemic, a step that scientists have refused to take. “All these increases in recurrent disease are not caused by a single phenomenon.”warned Jean-Daniel Lelieve, head of the Department of Clinical Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Henri Mondo Hospital in Créteil (Val-de-Marne).
Brigitte Autran, an immunologist and chair of the Committee for Monitoring and Anticipating Health Risks (Covars), called for caution: “There is no data that allows us to say with certainty that all these resurgences are a direct consequence of COVID-19 and quarantine measures. » However, some trends are emerging from the recent resurgence of the epidemic.
Masks slow down many viruses
The first one is as simple as addition. This is a catch-up phenomenon observed since October 2022, especially for bronchiolitis. But many respiratory viruses also slow down, such as the syncytial virus that causes the vast majority of bronchiolitis, or the influenza virus that causes annual influenza epidemics. As a result, children born between 2020 and 2022 have been largely unexposed to these viruses, which disproportionately affect the youngest among them.
But once health restrictions are lifted in the spring of 2022, these viruses will spread once more, infecting a larger than usual population of non-immune children. All in all, several generations of children are hospitalized at the same time, saturating already weak services.
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“Today, collective immunity is lacking for these diseases, which have barely spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. When they reach unprepared ground, they tend to spread faster and take on more severe forms.” explains Stéphane Paul, professor of immunology and member of the Technical Committee on Vaccination of the Higher Authority for Health.
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