The seventh wave of Covid continues to develop in France and we are now exceeding a weekly average of 120,000 daily infections. While it’s still hard to know when the peak will be, some early indicators point to an improvement during July. But in the short term, the situation should continue to worsen in hospitals that are already in dire straits due to staff shortages. “Since the beginning of the epidemic, we have made our models more complex, gradually adding new parameters describing the vaccine and natural immunity.explains Simon Kashemes, head of model teams at the Pasteur Institute. But we have reached such a high level of complexity that this model no longer works. We need to move to slightly simpler models that take the global situation into account, even if that means losing a little bit of accuracy in the long run.”
The scientist has just posted the forecast for the next few days on the Pasteur Institute website. They go to July 18 and count about 1,700 hospital admissions per day over this horizon, compared to a thousand right now. In critical care, admissions will rise to about 160 a day, where they are currently about 100. “Beyond these numbers, the arguments allow us to be a little optimistic for the month of July, continues the scientist. The growth rates of hospitalizations and the number of cases are decreasing in some regions and particularly in Ile de France.
“Comparable to the flu.”
In other words, the cases are growing less rapidly in recent days, which may foretell a decline. And this, especially since the school holidays start this week and that for two years this has always led to a drop in infections. Moreover, even if nothing has been decided by the government on this subject, wearing masks is essential for a part of the population and should slow down, even modestly, pollution. “The last two waves were suspended without passing the new restrictionsadds Simon Cashemez. We are no longer in a context where the number of cases is growing exponentially without limits. A significant part of the population has immunity. We know that immunity declines over time, but there is no general loss of the entire population.
The epidemic no longer has the fuel to grow indefinitely throughout the population as it did in the first waves. Therefore the waves must follow one another at this rate of falling immunity. The number of cases starts to rise again, either due to a new variant or a more favorable weather or social context, such as the start of the school year in September, and then starts to fall again when enough people are infected. Now all scientists have to do is predict the size of the waves. “We hope to develop a model that is comparable to the flu model, explains Simon Cashemez. We do not take into account past individual infections or different vaccine profiles, but we manage to predict the height of the waves.
Source: Le Figaro
