Lhe covid is experiencing a perceptible rebound in France, as the school holidays and the Olympic Games approach.
“It started with sweats in the middle of the night and trembling legs. At first, I put it down to the sudden changes in the weather. Until a colleague told me that covid was coming back. I was surprised at first, but I went to get tested after work, and it was dead positive,” says Rita, a 40-year-old from Ile-de-France. “This is my second covid, and I’m coughing a lot, knowing that I have asthma,” she adds (fever, headaches and body aches are the other symptoms to watch out for).
More than four years after the start of the pandemic, several signals of increasing circulation are converging, as in other European countries.
In hospitals or in community medicine, “recourses for suspected covid have continued to increase for eight weeks”, even if they still remain modest, observed Public Health France on Wednesday.
An “increasingly marked” increase, both for visits to emergencies (+52% over one week) and to SOS Médecins (+51%, with 1,507 procedures from June 3 to 10).
Wastewater, where the presence of Sars-CoV-2 is monitored in 12 stations, also shows a clear progression in viral circulation over the past month.
“After a long period of low activity”, several European countries have experienced an epidemic rebound in recent weeks, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) recently reported.
The cause: an “immune decline” of the population, but also “an immune escape” of the new sub-variants of the virus, all members of the omicron JN.1 lineage. The spike protein, which allows SARS-CoV-2 to enter host cells, appears to have key mutations in these variants.
