French health professionals today expressed concern about the circulation of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus among children and adolescents of school age, and proposed to the Government concrete actions to face this challenge.
In an open letter addressed to the Minister of Health Olivier Véran, published tonight by Le Journal du Dimanche, 50 doctors, specialists and nurses warned that since the beginning of November more than 300 thousand minors have tested positive for Covid-19, which it hits the country in its fifth wave.
The figures of children and adolescents admitted to conventional services and intensive care in hospitals have exceeded all the peaks of previous outbreaks in the last six weeks and are constantly increasing, the text underlines.
The undersigned health personnel warned that they foresee in the weeks to come an unprecedented increase in minors affected by a pediatric multisystemic inflammatory syndrome and by sequelae attributed to the evolution of Covid-19.
Faced with the challenging scenario, they regretted “the limited means deployed in schools so far by the Ministry of Education to stop the pandemic.”
They also questioned the criticism of some experts of the vaccination campaign for children between the ages of five and 11 and their efforts to minimize the impact of the disease in that age group.
Professionals urged the French Health Minister to postpone the return to classrooms scheduled for January 3, develop a new sanitary protocol in schools, improve aeration and ventilation of premises, confront misinformation around Covid-19 and children and sensitize families on the subject.
Vaccination campaign against Covid19 in children and adolescents
France launched on December 22 the vaccination campaign against covid-19 for children aged 5 to 11 years like other European countries, while in China the 13 million inhabitants of the city of Xi’an were confined by an outbreak of infections .
“We open the official vaccination for children” of that age group, declared the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, specifying that the booster dose has not yet been extended to adolescents.
On the same day, Finland announced that its vaccination campaign for children aged 5 to 12 will start after Christmas.
Other European countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Greece, Spain and Portugal also announced that they would extend vaccination to children.
For her part, the French Minister of Labor, Élisabeth Borne, asked companies this Wednesday to “accelerate” the use of teleworking in the face of covid-19, urging them to prepare “from now on” to “reinforce it” after the end of the holidays. years with a goal of 3 to 4 days per week.
“It is clear that with the current situation it is necessary to accelerate, reinforce teleworking (…) with a view to a minimum of three days a week in the positions that allow it, four days when possible,” the minister told the radio. Europe 1.
The wave of infections caused by the omicron variant is advancing rapidly in France, a few days before Christmas, and about 20% of the positive cases of covid-19 in the country correspond to that contagious variant, compared to 10% last weekend. week, the government said Tuesday night.
The incidence rate of covid-19 reached a record in France, with 545 cases per week per 100,000 inhabitants and nearly double in Paris.
Likewise, the new variant extends throughout Europe. “Ómicron is becoming, or has already become, dominant in several countries, including Denmark, Portugal and the United Kingdom, where the numbers are doubling every day and a half to three days, with unprecedented transmission rates,” said Dr. Hans Kluge. , Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) for Europe.
Denmark has 1,215 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the last seven days, while the United Kingdom has a rate of 898 per 100,000, 698 in Ireland and 635 in Switzerland.
