When the symbolic threshold of 100,000 cases a day has just been surpassed, France has fully entered its fifth wave of COVID-19 fearing a paralysis of the country due to an expected increase in sick leave due to the contagiousness of omicron.
On the eve of the Council of Ministers that will propose new rules to stop the advance of the virus and thus avoid “the disorganization” of the country projected this week by the Scientific Council that advises the Government, a group of health workers has published a controversial letter this Sunday.
In it, they ask that the return to school be postponed, scheduled for January 3, 2022, until the incidence has dropped to levels considered safe (currently it is around 650 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, far from the 200 cases of the level considered safe).
The 50 health professionals from different specialties argue that this will prevent the new wave of covid from aggravating “the unprecedented increase” of the multisystemic inflammatory syndrome among the youngest, considered the first cause of the admission of minors to ucis.
According to this group, hospitalizations of children already exceed those of the previous waves, with more than 800 of less than 10 years, while those of adolescents are at 300, “figures that do not stop growing.”
The letter aims to pressure the Executive of Emmanuel Macron, very reluctant since the beginning of the pandemic to close schools due to the negative impact it has on the development of minors and on the organization of families.
“If the role of the school is indisputable, we regret the limited means implemented so far by the Ministry of Education to stop the epidemic in schools,” denounce the signatories, alluding to the lack of air filters or a test campaign “effective”.
New measures
Meanwhile, the Government is preparing to approve tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. local time a new battery of measures against the covid in the Council of Ministers. An hour before, Macron will be in charge of the Sanitary Defense Council in which the guidelines of the new law will be given.
The Executive’s projection is that it will be approved in the National Assembly in mid-January 2022. Among the new measures that will come into force, the controversial imposition of the obligation to be vaccinated as the only option to obtain the essential health pass is expected. to lead a normal life and that until now could also be achieved with a negative test. Convincing the 5 million French who remain to be vaccinated is the main objective.
It is also speculated that the isolation rules for contact cases will be relaxed (it can reach 17 days for the omicron variant). The idea would be to avoid a lack of personnel that would prevent basic sectors from working normally due to sick leave.
”If there are more than 100,000 daily cases, you have ten effective contact cases for each case; it means that there are 1 million people who would have to be confined “, warns this Sunday in the columns of the” Jornal de Dimanche “(JDD) the prestigious epidemiologist Antoine Flahault.
Relativize the risk of economic stagnation
Also in the pages of the JDD, the president of the French employers’ association, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, assumes some concern about the economic impacts of the fifth wave, although he asks to “relativize”.
“We have learned a lot in two years of the pandemic,” says Roux de Bézieux, who insists that “there is no reason to panic” about a possible shortage.
The business leader clarified that the French case will be different from the British one, since the neighboring United Kingdom, in difficulties to maintain normal economic activity by omicron, left a million jobs unfilled for “having closed the doors” to immigrants.
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