Health situation, wearing a mask, targeted and common sense measures, doctor Gérald KIERZEK, emergency doctor and medical director of Doctissimo takes stock in a new live video of the emergencies.
I take a few minutes on my guard to bounce back on the news and the increase in cases of contamination.
As usual, the more you test, the more you find. Yes, there is an increase in cases, yes, there is an increase in the incidence rate, but these are always decorrelated from hospitalizations which do not move.
In Brittany, for example, the incidence rates are exploding there, but these are mainly cases of covid colds without admissions to critical care in the last few weeks and it is important to specify this!
Second thing, and this is the current debate, should we put the mask back on or not?
Above all, we should stop treating everyone the same. With Omicron, you cannot apply measures to the entire population when these same measures do not make much sense. And putting on the mask in the general population no longer makes sense! We see this in Italy for example, faced with the same dynamic of rising cases while the FFP2 mask is compulsory in public transport. On the other hand, it is necessary to differentiate between fragile or at-risk populations and places at risk. Wearing the mask in a pharmacy where fragile or at-risk populations meet, that makes sense. So, yes to the mask in pharmacies, nursing homes, and hospitals of course.
The same goes for vaccination, let’s stop running after young people without a risk factor for a serious form when it is necessary at all costs to vaccinate those at risk, the most fragile. The strategy must be personalized and not generalized. Half of transplant patients and therefore at risk of a serious form, do not have a complete vaccination schedule.
So, it is urgent to stop taking generalized measures that piss everyone off (to use a now famous expression), and to target strategies (wearing a mask, vaccination, even early treatment) on the people most at risk.