Macron government rejects national lock-down in France
Yesterday, French authorities reported that 969 people had died in the space of 24 hours on December 29, bringing the official total in the past week to 2,376, and the total since the beginning of the pandemic to 64,078. Over ten thousand cases are being reported every day, though this is likely a significant underestimate due to reduced testing through the holiday period. Over 48 hours from December 24 to 25, more than 40,000 new cases were recorded. As of yesterday, 24,776 people remained hospitalized with COVID-19 in the country.
French President Emmanuel Macron (Image Credit: AP Photo/Francois Mori)
On Monday evening, Health Minister Olivier Véran appeared on the France 2 evening news following a meeting of the defense council that morning. Despite the catastrophic and accelerating situation in France, Véran announced that the government “reject[s] the idea of general or local lockdowns.” The only new measures announced on Tuesday were that twenty departments, predominantly in the East of France, may see curfew measures brought forward by two hours to 6:00 p.m., beginning on January 2. Crucially, these measures do not include the closure of schools, nor the stopping of non-essential work.
French testing system missed 9 of 10 COVID-19 cases after first lock-down
On December 21,
Nature published a peer-reviewed accelerated article titled, “Under-detection of cases of COVID-19 in France threatens epidemic control.” In the paper, epidemiologists and data scientists led by Giulia Pullano use mathematical modelling to chart the estimated spread of the virus in France over seven weeks—from the end of lock-down measures, on May 11, to June 28. They compare this estimated spread of the virus to the recorded cases to measure the effectiveness of France’s test and trace system in this period.
During this period, Santé publique France (the public health system) recorded a few hundred cases a day. However, the authors estimate that France’s testing system missed around 90,000 symptomatic COVID-19 infections. This amounts to 86 percent of symptomatic cases. As many cases are asymptomatic, however, the true rate of detection in this period was likely well under 10 percent.