Nearly 6 million deaths worldwide and 366 million cases. This Thursday, January 27, France exceeded the symbolic bar of 130,000 deaths from Covid-19, almost without making much of it. We can even bet that many of us generally do not remember the figures mentioned above and have not paid attention to the peak of 467 deaths reached this week. If the Covid-19 still occupies a large place in the media space, the French no longer follow the slightly macabre daily count of the first confinement. Since the second wave, our relationship to death linked to the pandemic seems to have become more and more commonplace. Dying of Covid-19 is no longer something extraordinary, seeming to deserve collective mourning.
The trend is obviously not just French. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in mid-January that the next step would be to treat Covid “like one more respiratory disease”. And this, while the Spanish death toll has fluctuated in recent days around 200 every day. Same music in Denmark, which intends to “find the life of before” from February 1. It took us less than two years, faced with this new virus, to get used to what still seemed exceptional to us a few months ago.
Habituation effect
It is indeed difficult to compare the situation of 2020 to that of today. “In March 2020, the French State took the decision to confine when the virus was killing a hundred people a day – a number which was going to increase much faster afterwards – while we are flirting with almost double today”, says note David Simard, Doctor of Health Philosophy. With practice, the “stunned” effect of the first wave eventually faded. “Our relationship to the pandemic has changed, as well as that to its deaths, he continues. There has been an effect of getting used to the situation.”
A situation that is all the more difficult to envisage since, despite the individual stories of families torn apart by the pandemic, we most often represent it in figures. “It’s a question of image: from the start of the Covid, in Wuhan, China, we did not see the dead”, points out epidemiologist Antoine Flahault. If the situation could have been brought to change, in particular with the Italian videos of the army evacuating corpses by truck, the notion of death ended up moving away from our collective daily life. “Today’s deaths are above all statistical – they cannot be seen, continues Antoine Flahault. Unlike a plane crash, which would mobilize the attention of the media for several days, the deaths of Covid no longer make the headlines – at least not in pictures.”
Of ‘domestic deaths’
An important factor in a very individualistic French society. “In France, deaths are reserved for the private circle, points out Marie-Frédérique Bacqué, professor of clinical psychopathology universities and director of the International Center for Studies on Death. Insofar as there was no collective ceremony in our country, these deaths remained ‘private deaths'”. Spain, on the other hand, paid a solemn tribute to the victims of Covid-19 in July. In April, the United Kingdom had for its part produced a giant fresco of 150,000 hearts in tribute to the victims. “Which has not been the case in France, notes the psychologist. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that the French, a secular population and who claim it, can find it quite difficult to get out of the religious world for carry out sacred collective ceremonies, in the sense of respect for the body and human dignity”. A silence that could hurt, especially among families who were unable to benefit, during confinement, from the usual funeral for their deceased.
“In France, the dead are reserved for the private circle”
But this “forgetting” of death can also be attributed to the profile of deceased patients. According to data from Public Health France, 91% of coronavirus deaths were aged 65 and over. The vast majority of them – 65% had comorbidity. In a country where the median age is 41, distancing oneself from the general population is necessarily easier. “Great aging is not a value that we are very concerned about in France, points out Marie-Frédérique Bacqué. There is a very clear ageism in our country, which was expressed on many occasions before the pandemic. For the psychologist, the deaths of the oldest are to be compared with that of… actor Gaspard Ulliel, 37, who died after a skiing accident a few days ago. “The emotion surrounding the death of this actor is quite significant, she believes. Besides his talent, a large part came from the fact that he died young.”
inevitable death
The death of older, even very old people, even from a disease like Covid-19, is therefore seen as more inevitable. “More broadly, we rarely think about death constantly, every day. Major events like this pandemic, but also the arrival of AIDS, or the heat wave of 2003, serve as a kind of reminder shot: they show the problems in our management of the end of life, funeral rites”, explains Martin Julier-Costes socio-anthropologist specialist in death and mourning, who adds: “The loneliness of the elderly, the difficulties in nursing homes… pandemic has not exposed these issues, but heightened their visibility.”
“To return to the image of the plane, we are much more moved by an air disaster than by a large number of diseases, slips Antoine Flahault. Before the first cause of death in France was myocardial infarction, with 90 deaths a day.” And 600,000 deaths a year. “Deaths that we did not talk about every day. Man is so made that what is not exceptional only moves him a little, does not stir up his conception of risk.” The arrival of the vaccine, and the idea that only a very vulnerable population falls victim to the disease, has greatly helped the disappearance of our fixation on death.
A flu-like illness
Our report would ultimately slip more and more, to paraphrase the Spanish Prime Minister, into that of a flu-like illness. And this, with the same indifference as that which accompanies the deaths linked to this virus each year in France. Indeed, as observed by demographers France Meslé and Gilles Pison in an article for The Conservation, the flu also causes waves of deaths with more or less significant peaks depending on the year. “We have had, over the past five or six years, several winters with relatively deadly seasonal flu episodes”, specifies with the Express Gilles Pison, professor emeritus at the national museum of natural history and researcher at the National Institute for Demographic Studies. Between 2014 and 2019, four winters indeed led to excess mortality linked to influenza epidemics, which amounted to 20,000 additional deaths between the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 seasons and 12,000 between 2018-2019. Figures lower than those linked to Covid, but significant. “It was estimated that 70% of these deaths were attributable to the flu,” he continues. All this, without the general population being moved more than that.
“It is a mortality which is not surprising, or little, while elements make it possible to protect against it: there is a vaccine for each season, for example, that not all caregivers take. Similarly, a high proportion of elderly and frail people are not vaccinated either”, points out the researcher. Something to recall the debates on vaccination which are currently raging with the Covid-19. In the past two years, partly due to pandemic precautions, the number of circulating influenza cases was lower than in previous years. “However, this question is all the more important since if we resume normal life despite the virus, there is no reason why seasonal flu epidemics should not become more important again, underlines Gilles Pison. We we have the opportunity, so we have to protect ourselves.” Because neither the flu nor the Covid are to be taken lightly.