New study: Confinement in France saved 61,000 lives
Confinement has prevented more than 61,000 deaths in France from Covid-19, according to new research.
Three researchers at the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health (EHESP) have identified what the human cost of Covid-19 would have been if the country had not been placed in confinement.
President Emmanuel Macron announced the nationwide lockdown on March 16, which began the following day.
The computer model developed by EHESP simulates the spread of the virus within the French population over the course of a month from March 19, if no action had been taken.
Their scientific model, covering 13 French metropolitan areas, also examined what the potential impact would have been on hospitalisations, intensive care admissions and deaths.
The analysis predicted that 14.8m people would have been infected with Covid-19 in France if confinement measures had not been implemented.
It also predicts there would have been more than 585,000 hospitalisations, 140,000 intensive care admissions and almost 62,000 deaths over the course of the month.
The 32-page study, published on Wednesday April 22, concludes that “in absence of any control measures, the Covid-19 epidemic would have had a critical morbidity and mortality burden in France, overwhelming French hospital capacities in a matter of weeks.”
The research, undertaken by Professor Pascal Crépey, Dr Jonathan Roux and Clément Massonnaud, does not include numbers from elderly care homes, which has accounted for around a third of the total number of deaths from Covid-19.
The research took into account various factors including variations in age groups and location.
François Blanquart, a researcher at the national scientific research centre (CNRS), told newspaper Le Figaro: “The model is solid and the criteria chosen reflect fairly well the scientific consensus on what we know about Covid-19.”
Lulla Opatowski, a researcher at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and the medical research centre Institut Pasteur, added: "These figures remind us of the reason why the confinement was decided urgently in mid-March, [which was] to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed, which would have seriously increased the mortality rates.”
The most recent update from April 23 showed that so far, 21,340 many people have died from Covid-19-related causes in France.
