five years ago, China announced its first death, in Wuhan

That was five years ago, at a time when Covid-19 was not yet called Covid-19. The media reported a mysterious pneumonia affecting the inhabitants of the Wuhan region, in China, and which had just claimed its first victim: a 61-year-old man with cancer, a regular customer at the city’s fish market where the virus had appeared a few years ago. weeks earlier. His death was announced by the Chinese authorities on January 11, 2020, making him the first official death of the epidemic.

At least 20 million dead

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than seven million others followed. These are only deaths officially attributed to Covid-19. The real numbers are much higher. The WHO recognizes this: after analyzing excess mortality during the first three years of the pandemic, it rather estimated the number of victims at 20 million. In France, the latest official report reported around 168,000 deaths, around two-thirds of whom died between 2020 and 2021.

“We realized quite quickly the pandemic potential of the strain. There was no reason for the epidemic to remain confined to China,” recalls epidemiologist Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, for whom the simultaneous appearance of outbreaks in Iran, South Korea and Italy served as an alarm signal: “When we saw that these three countries, completely disconnected from each other, were blazing badly, we said to ourselves that the pandemic was in progress. spreading. »

An unprecedented capacity for mutation

We know what happened next: the lockdowns, the empty streets, the closed businesses, the wailing of sirens, the anxiety-inducing images of saturated hospitals, exhausted caregivers and lonely funerals. Controversies over the availability of masks, tests and vaccines. Controversies over health strategy and the relevance of restrictions. Then the rebirth, gradual, each wave seeming less deadly as the population became immunized. A Danish study calculated that in Europe, vaccines had reduced mortality due to Covid-19 by almost 60%. This represents approximately 1.6 million lives saved. Acquired by vaccines and contamination, this immunity seems to put all variants in check.

“The big surprise was the tremendously evolving power of SARS-CoV-2,” continues Antoine Flahault. More than 2,000 sub-variants of Omicron, now responsible for almost all contaminations, have been identified. “I don’t know of any virus that mutates so much. I was expecting something akin to the flu, with a second wave already smaller. It was quite the opposite: the reproduction rate of the virus was increasingly important with each variant. The percentage of the population reached by the first two waves was perhaps 10 to 20%. But the Omicron waves that followed affected almost 100% of the population,” continues the epidemiologist.

Deadlier than the flu

From now on, Covid-19 has almost become a disease like any other. Since summer 2023, it has been monitored in the same way as other acute respiratory infections. However, SARS-CoV-2 continues to kill, at a faster rate than the flu. Since October 2024, 208 people have been admitted to intensive care for Covid-19, of whom 43 have died, according to the latest Public Health France bulletin. For the flu, over the same period, the figures are 318 admissions for 23 deaths. For comparison, more than 600 people died from Covid-19 in France on the day of April 3, 2020 alone.

Again, these are only official figures. Most deaths attributable to Covid-19, like the flu, go under the radar due to lack of testing. But if there is one thing that has not changed since the start of the epidemic, it is the profile of serious cases: the overwhelming majority of patients admitted to intensive care in recent months suffer from comorbidity and are not vaccinated .