According to one study, thousands of lives were saved by the first incarceration

France’s first confinement decree during the Covid-19 pandemic, the strictest, had the strongest effect, reducing transmission of the virus by 84%, estimates a large study that also assessed the impact of curfews and vaccinations.

Researchers from the University and University Hospital of Bordeaux, INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) and INRIA (Research Institute for Digital Sciences and Technologies) are communicating this Wednesday estimates on the effectiveness of restrictive measures (lockdowns, curfews, etc.). and vaccination policy, based on mathematical modeling of data available in France between March 2020 and October 2021. Their results, published in the journal Epidemic , showed that the most restrictive measures, such as confinement and curfews, had a significant effect on reducing the transmission of the virus. According to these researchers, the first confinement from March 17 to May 11, 2020, was the most effective, reducing the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by 84%. A 6 pm curfew proved more effective than an 8 pm curfew (68% reduction compared to 48%), the study also notes.

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Although school closures had a more limited effect, they reduced viral transmission by 15%. And according to these simulations, confinement in France a week earlier would have avoided 20,000 deaths. The president of the Scientific Council during the Covid crisis, Jean-Francois Delfresse, expressed regret in September 2020 that he had not pushed France to limit it a few days earlier.

Proven benefits of vaccines

For this study, the researchers also simulated the situation without the vaccine until the end of the analyzed period (March 2020-October 2021): there would have been 159,000 additional deaths and 1.48 million more hospitalizations in France. either “Double” Number of deaths reported. In contrast, with an earlier vaccine (after 100 days, which was the initial goal of the International Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), 71,000 deaths and 384,000 hospitalizations could have been avoided.

These data are consistent with other studies, especially from the World Health Organization (WHO), Inserm underlined in a press release on Wednesday. In mid-January, the WHO estimated that anti-Covid vaccines had saved at least 1.4 million lives in Europe. “Although the exercise is complicated to estimate the number of people saved by a specific intervention, all studies find a large effect of incarceration and vaccination”Rodolphe Thibaut, professor of public health at the Bordeaux Population Health Research Center and lead author of the study, commented in the press release.