When is the end of the tunnel? If the flu epidemic continues to decline in metropolitan France, many regions remain affected and this episode has already reached an exceptionally long duration, indicated Public Health France. Last Friday, eight regions remained in the epidemic phase, three less than two weeks earlier, but as many as the previous week.
With a “always heavy traffic” of the virus in France, the epidemic phase thus reached, between March 20 and 26, its eighteenth week of activity, specifies the public health agency in its last epidemiological bulletin published on March 29. As a benchmark, the average duration of flu epidemics has been between ten and eleven weeks since 2010. Never, therefore, in the past twelve years, has the virus been raging for so long in France.
After two years without influenza, this epidemic had surprised from the beginning of winter in other respects, in particular by manifesting itself early, but also by increasing very rapidly at the end of the year and reaching very high levels in medical city and hospital. Several factors explain this unprecedented longevity and virulence.