Covid-19: “We have reason to be optimistic”, says Gabriel Attal – LCI

After reaching record levels of Covid-19 contamination, a slight improvement has recently been felt. “We have reason to be optimistic” about the epidemic, government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Tuesday, based on “the statements of a number of scientists” going in the same direction in recent days.

“We see that the Delta wave has really regressed, that the circulation tends to slow down, and that in the regions where the Omicron wave started first, in particular in Ile-de-France, there is what seems to be the beginning of a ‘a decline’, he noted on CNews. The Delta variant currently represents approximately 20,000 cases per day and now represents only 7.3% of cases. Omicron continues to grow and is responsible for nearly 93% of new contaminations. In Île-de-France and Corsica, the data shows that the peak seems to have passed. Other regions have not yet reached this level, but seem ready to do so. This is particularly the case of the Grand Est and Normandy.

According to Guillaume Rozier, the founder of the CovidTracker epidemic monitoring tool, “it seems that we are starting a plateau rather than a rapid descent”, while 102,144 positive cases were declared on Monday, an increase of 9% compared to last Monday, and the daily average is 295,631 cases (+10% over one week).

“We see that in our intensive care units, the situation has stabilized, the tension is no longer increasing, now we obviously have to remain vigilant and continue our efforts”, continued Gabriel Attal, saying to himself “always careful on these issues”. The number of patients with Covid hospitalized in critical care (the most serious cases) has been stable in recent days, around 3,900.

The number of cases of contamination is still very high (295,630 daily cases on average over the last seven days) but is increasing at a slower rate. However, underlines on Twitter Guillaume Rozier, “the number of positive tests is falling, but the number of tests carried out (positive and negative) is falling even faster”. “It is therefore difficult to know to what extent the drop in positive tests is linked to an epidemic drop”, he writes.