Confinement 2: A New Hope
Let’s ressurect this blog on a cheerful note. 3 weeks into our 2nd confinement here in France, the not-so-big secret is it is indeed getting better.*
* but since we’re talking about Covid-19, the true more complete answer is never that simple.
Hospital occupancy going down
The most solid evidence is in the hospitals: the number of patients currently occupying regular hospital or ICU beds have not only flattened, but have even begun to go down .
New admissions going down even faster
You can also see that new patient admissions to hospital and ICU are going down even faster. This naturally bodes well for future hospital & ICU occupancy too.
New deaths may be flattening
Daily Covid deaths are now barely increasing, and you can only really see the increase by zooming in on the last few days. Since ICU occupancy as well as new admissions are already decreasing, we can expect to soon see deaths level off.
This lag is to be expected: most patients will spend considerble time battling Covid in hospital or ICU before they pass away.
Another sobering thought to keep in mind: not all Covid deaths are in the hospital. To date, EHPADs (senior homes) account for ~1/3 of total Covid deaths.
(Deaths in EHPAD are only reported 2x a week, so there are no daily numbers. But as of Nov 10 there were 13000 cumulative EHPAD deaths, and nearly 29000 cumulative deaths in hospital).
But the war ain’t over
On Nov 20, the only France metroplitaine region with less than 60% ICU saturation was Bretagne.
ICU Covid occupancy for France métropolitaine was ~90% as of Nov 19.
Some of you may recall that 60% ICU saturation was the threshold for Etat d’urgence sanitaire. This was the most dire of the 4 short-lived alert levels that were introduced in September (and seem to have since been abandoned). It was set to this seemingly-low level to allow ICUs to continue to receive non-Covid patients.
In Macron’s speech in mid-October, he explained that a sustainable level of Covid patients in ICU is 10-15%.
"on doit aussi fortement les réduire pour au fond, revenir à un niveau de nombre de cas Covid en réanimation, qui est de l'ordre de 10 à 15 % d'honoraire au maximum, parce que là, c'est soutenable."
What 10-15% ICU occupancy looks like
In the animation below:
- the first date (June 15) is when France was at ~15% ICU Covid occupancy
- the second date (June 30) is ~10% occupancy.
This was the receding of the first Covid wave—from a peak in early April. You’ll see it continue to go lower until August.
Next post: an incidence rate reality check
In my next post, I’ll explain that the plunge in incidence rates, while definitely a clear trend, is not quite as spectacular as some news articles has made it sound.