Masks, surveillance, prevention… Three years after the official arrival of Covid-19 in France, what have we really learned from this pandemic?
It was exactly three years ago. On January 24, 2020, Agnès Buzyn, then Minister of Health, announced the first two confirmed cases of Covid-19 in France. A third was declared during the day. Since then, confinements, deconfinements, epidemic waves, vaccination and recall campaigns have followed one another. But what have we really learned from the Covid-19 pandemic?
“Useless” was the word used by Olivier Véran on March 4, 2020 to describe the use of masks for all people who are not positive for Covid-19, vulnerable to this disease or health professionals. A few months ago, he was doing his mea culpadeclaring to Parisian that “the truth is that, on the masks, we were wrong, neither more nor less”.
For infectious disease specialist Benjamin Davido, this is a lesson that will probably be learned: “we would not make the same mistake tomorrow, the word ‘mask’ has entered the vocabulary”.
“In the population, there is a greater sensitivity to public health reflexes such as wearing a mask or washing hands”, abounds the sociologist of health policies Daniel Benamouzig.
“Everyone knows what a mask is and when to put it on. The big unknown is whether it will persist,” adds the CNRS research director.
Better monitoring tools
The one who was part of the Scientific Council concerning Covid-19 believes that the pandemic has also brought to light the fact that “a fraction of the population is reluctant to these public health issues, on the question of vaccination, freedoms or distrust of public authorities”.
He also notes a “much stronger awareness of elected officials”, at the local level in particular, on public health issues and a dissemination of the idea that these “are the responsibility of the State”.
Epidemiological surveillance tools have also been “awakened” with Covid-19, underlines Benjamin Davido, infectious disease specialist at Raymond-Poincaré hospital in Garches. At the beginning of 2020, “we did not have this know-how of monitoring infectious agents” since the latest alerts such as H1N1, Ebola, or SARS ultimately affected France little.
Not enough prevention
However, the infectious disease specialist believes that “we would be able to repeat the same mistakes”. Taking the example of monkeypox, he notes that “the reaction time was long, it was difficult to be in anticipation. However, we had the PCR tests, the vaccine, we had integrated the fact to test asymptomatic people, and all the countries hesitated anyway”.
While the first case in France was confirmed on May 19, 2022preventive vaccination was proposed only after the opinion of the High Authority for Health from July 8, 2022.
The various specialists interviewed by BFMTV.com agree on the fact that despite three years of the Covid-19 epidemic, progress remains to be made in anticipating and preventing this type of event. For Alice Desbiolles, public health doctor and author of the book Repair health“more emphasis should be placed on the overall consideration of health and the prevention of risk factors, on the environmental level for example”.
In October 2020, UN experts authored a report on biodiversity underlined that the risk of a pandemic was notably increased by “human activities that fuel the loss of biodiversity”. They also estimated that the cost of reducing the risk of pandemics was 100 times lower than the cost of responding to these pandemics (drugs, vaccines, etc.)
Despite these lessons, “we remain focused on the treatment of diseases rather than focusing on lifestyles”, “determinants of health risks”, such as alcohol, tobacco, food or housing, regrets the sociologist Daniel Benamouzig.
No overall feedback
Epidemiologist Alice Desbiolles also deplores the lack of “real feedback, of debate between citizens, experts and politicians, which should have been brought into the public debate. We need a global panorama on the management of the Covid-19.”
Same story with infectious disease specialist Benjamin Davido: “we should be able to start the retrospective of what we have done good and less well”.
“We had no feedback, including at local level, which destabilizes the teams after a tireless effort,” he laments.
This effort demanded of caregivers for three years is precisely another factor of fear in the face of a hypothetical new pandemic. “The hospital has been devastated by successive waves and now the triple epidemic” of Covid-19, bronchiolitis and influenza and “the supply of care has not increased”, insists Benjamin Davido. Result: “we do with the same means, the same charitable souls, but more tired”.
