While for five consecutive days the number of Covid-19 contaminations has been falling, Santé Publique France recalls that the rate of new hospitalizations over seven days continues to increase. This suggests that the peak of the seventh wave will soon be reached within the population, and that, logically, that of hospitalizations should not take long to follow.
“As it is very difficult to predict the evolution of this pandemic, we cannot say today that the seventh wave has reached its peak of contaminations. But if it did, then we could reach the peak of hospitalizations in ten days, and that of mortality towards the end of July – beginning of August”, explains to L’Express the epidemiologist Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Medicine of Geneva.
Over the past fourteen days, the number of critical care admissions has increased by 27%, while the number of deaths has jumped by 120%. Data that questions the hospital’s resilience in the coming weeks. “The hospital system will experience tensions in the weeks to come, but we can think that the intensive care units will be less overloaded than during the waves preceding Omicron”, tempers Antoine Flahault, who underlines the good vaccine protection for adults under 70. .
Frontline geriatric services
The concern of the health authorities mainly concerns the elderly. Especially since at the beginning of July, only 33.7% of those over 80 and 26.5% of those over 60 had received a second booster dose, equivalent, in most cases, to a fourth dose of vaccine. If the number of severe forms were to increase among the elderly, geriatrics departments could particularly suffer, especially since this population is also very affected by the effects of heat waves.
“The lack of staff and the summer holidays will not make things easier”, concedes the epidemiologist, who anticipates “deferrals of non-urgent care in certain departments”. But not enough to panic, especially if we refer to the case of Portugal, where the peak of the seventh wave has now passed.
This country, of which nearly 95% of the population received two doses of vaccine, did not experience a health tsunami, while having a health system less developed than in France. As with the other variants, it was the elderly who suffered the most, with 90% of those who died being over 70 years old.